MLA Citation Generator
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN and get an MLA 9 works cited entry with its in-text citation. Authors, titles, volume and pages come from the publisher's record in CrossRef, Europe PMC, arXiv or OpenLibrary, so nothing is typed by hand.
How to create an MLA citation
Step 1
Paste the source
A DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN, or a link to it. Up to 50, one per line. A .bib, RIS, EndNote or PubMed export works too.
Step 2
Pick what you need
MLA is already the style. Single citation gives the works cited entry, Reference list gives the whole Works Cited page, sorted, In-text citation gives (LeCun et al. 437).
Step 3
Copy
The works cited list keeps its italics and hanging indent when you paste it into Word or Google Docs.
MLA 9 format by source type
Real entries from the generator. MLA builds every entry from the same core elements: author, title of the source, title of the container (the journal or book it sits in), then version, volume, publisher, date and location.
Journal article
LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Book
Goodfellow, Ian, et al. Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016.
Chapter in an edited book
Rumelhart, David E., et al. “Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors.” Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research, edited by James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld, MIT Press, 1988, pp. 696–99.
Conference paper
Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30, 2017, pp. 5998–6008.
A chapter needs its own details: an ISBN finds the whole book, so add the chapter title, its authors, the editors and pages to the book entry.
MLA rules the generator applies
- Title case for every title: "Attention Is All You Need". Article and chapter titles go in quotation marks, books and journals in italics.
- et al. from three authors. One author: Surname, First name. Two: "Jordan, M. I., and T. M. Mitchell." Three or more: the first author and et al.
- Shortened page ranges. 436–444 becomes 436–44: MLA drops the repeated digits of the second number. It is correct, not a typo.
- DOI as the location. A source with a DOI ends with the https://doi.org link, followed by a full stop.
- No publisher city. MLA 9 leaves out the place of publication for books.
MLA in-text citations: author and page, no year
An MLA in-text citation is the author's surname and the page you are citing, with no comma and no "p.":
(LeCun et al. 437)
If you name the author in your sentence, only the page stays in the parentheses: LeCun et al. describe ... (437). The year appears only in the works cited entry. When two works by the same author would look identical, the generator adds a short title: (LeCun et al., "Deep Learning" 440). The MLA in-text citation generator covers the rules in detail.
The Works Cited page
Choose Reference list under I want and paste every source you cited, in any order. Six real sources came back like this:
Goodfellow, Ian, et al. Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016.
Jordan, M. I., and T. M. Mitchell. “Machine Learning: Trends, Perspectives, and Prospects.” Science, vol. 349, no. 6245, 2015, pp. 255–60, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa8415.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures.” TIMS Studies in Management Science, vol. 12, 1979, pp. 313–27.
———. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica, vol. 47, no. 2, 1979, pp. 263–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185.
LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Shannon, C. E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 1948, pp. 379–423, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
Sorted alphabetically, and the second Kahneman and Tversky entry starts with "———." in place of the names, as MLA asks for a repeated author. Copy all and paste it on a new page under the heading Works Cited: centred, plain text, double-spaced. The 0.5 inch hanging indent comes with the paste. List only the sources you cite.
Frequently asked questions
MLA 9, published in 2021. For articles, books and chapters an MLA 9 entry is the same as an MLA 8 entry: MLA 9 kept the core elements and added guidance, not new formats.
Paste its ISBN. You get Author. Title. Publisher, year. If you are citing one chapter of an edited book, add the chapter title in quotation marks, the editors and the page range, as in the chapter example above.
MLA shortens the second number of a range to its last two digits when the rest is the same. 436–444 becomes 436–44; 98–102 stays as it is.
Yes. MLA closes every works cited entry with a full stop, even when it ends in a link.
MLA replaces the author's name with "———." when the same author has more than one entry in a row. It only works when the entries are in one run, so paste all your sources together.
No. The generator needs a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN. Websites have no such record, so write those entries by hand.
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