MLA Citation Generator

How this MLA citation generator formats titles, containers, and page ranges

An MLA works cited entry is built from the source and its container, which is MLA’s word for the larger work the source sits inside. A journal article’s container is the journal. A chapter’s container is the book. The source title goes in quotation marks, the container title goes in italics.

LeCun, Yann, et al. "Deep Learning and the Future of Machine Vision." Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436-44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

Three things in there differ from what an APA habit would produce.

Titles are title case. MLA capitalises the principal words of both the article title and the journal name. APA lowercases article titles. If you are switching between styles mid-project this is the most visible difference, and it is the one that makes a reference look wrong at a glance.

Page ranges are abbreviated. MLA shortens the second number when both are three digits or more and share their leading digits, so 436 to 444 becomes 436-44, not 436-444. This mla citation generator applies that rule automatically. It looks like a typo if you have not seen it before, which is why it gets “corrected” by hand so often.

et al. starts at three authors. Two authors are both named, joined with “and”. Three or more gives the first author followed by et al. That threshold happens to match APA 7, but MLA reached it by a different route and applies it in the works cited entry as well as in text.

MLA in-text citations use the page number, not the year

This is the difference that catches people who have written in APA before.

An MLA in-text citation is the author’s surname and the page number, with no comma between them and no p. label:

(LeCun et al. 440)

No year. The year lives in the works cited entry only. If you name the author in your sentence, only the page number goes in the brackets: LeCun et al. argue that ... (440).

Because there is no year, MLA has no need for the 2015a and 2015b letters that APA uses to tell same-year works apart. Where two sources by the same author would be ambiguous, MLA adds a shortened title instead.

For the full works cited page, sorted and formatted, use the MLA works cited generator, which is the same engine set to produce the whole list rather than one entry. If you need APA as well, paste the sources once and switch the output style, nothing is fetched twice, or start from the APA citation generator instead.

Entries have to come from a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, ISBN, or a reference file, so websites and videos need writing by hand.

MLA 9 and MLA 8: what actually changed

The output here is MLA 9, published 2021. If your handout says MLA 8, you almost certainly do not need to do anything, and it is worth knowing why.

MLA 8 was the big change. It threw out the old system of a different template for every source type and replaced it with the container model described above, where you describe any source using the same set of elements. MLA 9 kept that model unchanged.

What MLA 9 added was guidance rather than format: an expanded chapter on inclusive language, more worked examples, fuller advice on annotated bibliographies, and clearer instruction on formatting the paper itself. For a journal article, a book, or a chapter, an entry built under MLA 9 is identical to one built under MLA 8.

So an mla 9 citation generator and an MLA 8 one produce the same works cited entry for most sources. Where you will see a difference is in the surrounding paper, not the citation: MLA 9 is more explicit about heading levels, running heads, and the works cited page layout.

If your instructor specified MLA 8 and you hand in MLA 9 entries, nothing will look wrong to them.