MLA referencing, 9th edition

MLA style comes from the Modern Language Association, in the United States. It’s used for English literature, modern languages, film and other humanities subjects, at school and at university. This guide follows the MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021). The Works Cited examples are Peel’s own output, so you can check yours against them.

MLA is an author-page style. In your writing, you give the author and the page. At the end, the Works Cited list gives the full details. Unlike APA and Harvard, there’s no year in the text.

In-text citations

An MLA citation is short: the author’s surname and the page number, in brackets, at the end of the sentence. The name must match the start of the source’s Works Cited entry, so your reader can find it.

The author and the page

Write the surname, a space and the page number. Don’t add a comma, “p.” or the year. If you’ve already named the author in your sentence, the brackets only need the page: Kahneman argues that … (81). For a quote, put the citation after the closing quotation mark and before the full stop.

Two or more authors

For two authors, give both surnames, joined by “and”: (Braun and Clarke 81). For three or more, give the first author’s surname and “et al.”, which means “and others”: (Saunders et al. 81). The Works Cited entry starts the same way, so the two match.

Organisations and no author

When an organisation is the author, use its name: (Name of the Organisation). If there’s no author at all, use a short form of the title instead, styled the same way as in your Works Cited list: in “quotation marks” for a page or article, or in italics for a book or website. Shorten it to its first few words.

No page numbers

Web pages and videos usually don’t have page numbers. Then give the author only: (McLeod). Don’t count paragraphs yourself. Only use a paragraph or section number if the source prints them. For a video or podcast, you can point to a moment with the time, in hours, minutes and seconds, as in (Surname 00:02:15).

Two sources, or two works by one author

To cite two sources at once, separate them with a semicolon: (Braun and Clarke; Kahneman et al.). If your Works Cited list has two or more works by the same author, add a short title after the name, with a comma: (Woolf, Room 81).

A quote you found in another source

If you quote words that your source was quoting from someone else, name the original speaker in your sentence. Then put “qtd. in” (quoted in) before the source you read: (qtd. in Surname 81). Only the source you read goes in your Works Cited list.

Works Cited: the core elements

MLA 9 builds every entry from the same core elements, always in the same order. Think of it as answering a few questions: who made it, what it’s called, what it’s part of, and where to find it. Leave out any element that doesn’t apply.

The key idea is the container: the bigger thing your source sits inside. A journal is the container for an article. An edited book is the container for a chapter. A website is the container for a web page. The source’s own title goes in “quotation marks”, and the container’s title goes in italics. A source that stands alone, like a book, has its title in italics and no container.

Put together, that’s the full entry:

Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 77–101, https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.

The punctuation follows the elements: a full stop after the author and after the title of the source, commas between the container’s elements, and a full stop at the end. Some sources have two containers, like an article in a journal that you read on JSTOR. Then the second container’s details follow the first’s, in the same order.

How to set out the Works Cited list

• Title: Works Cited, centred at the top of a new page.
• Order: A to Z by the first word of each entry. That’s usually the author’s surname, or the title when there’s no author (skip “A”, “An” and “The”). Don’t number the entries.
• Layout: double line spacing, and a hanging indent of 1.27 cm (0.5 inch). The first line of each entry starts at the margin, and the lines after it are indented.
• Names: the first author is surname first: Kahneman, Daniel. A second author goes in normal order: Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. For three or more, give the first author and “et al.”.
• Capital letters: titles are in title case, with a capital for each main word. Small words like “a”, “of” and “the” stay lower case unless they come first. Peel puts titles into title case for you, but give them a quick check: an odd small word can come out wrong.
• Dates: day, month and year, with most months shortened: 5 Mar. 2024. May, June and July are written in full.
• Publishers: no city. MLA shortens “University Press” to “UP”, as in Oxford UP. Peel does this for you.
• DOIs: if a source has a DOI, give it instead of a web address, starting https://doi.org/.
• More than one work by the same author: give the name in the first entry only. In the entries after it, put three hyphens and a full stop (---.) in place of the name. Do this by hand after you paste.

Access dates

The date you looked at a web page is optional in MLA 9. MLA recommends it when the page has no publication date, because the page could change. It goes at the very end: Accessed 20 Oct. 2026. Peel adds it to web pages with no date, as in the McLeod example below, and leaves it off pages that have a date.

Examples for each kind of source

Each card has a pattern to follow, a real example where there’s one, and the in-text citation.

A full Works Cited list

This is what Peel copies for four of the sources on this page, in MLA’s A to Z order. Paste it into Word or Google Docs and the italics and hanging indents come with it. Then set the line spacing to double.

• Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 77–101, https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.
• Hypertension in Adults: Diagnosis and Management. NICE guideline no. NG136, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2019, https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng136.
• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Allen Lane, 2011.
• McLeod, Saul. “Working Memory Model.” Simply Psychology, https://www.simplypsychology.org/working-memory.html. Accessed 20 Oct. 2026.

To build a list like this while you read, not the night before the deadline, see how to reference as you go. For a long essay or dissertation, how to track sources in each chapter shows how to keep each part’s sources together.

Common mistakes

• A comma between the author and the page. It’s (Kahneman 81), not (Kahneman, 81).
• Adding “p.” or the year in the text. MLA in-text citations have neither.
• Calling the list References or Bibliography. In MLA it’s Works Cited.
• Mixing up quotation marks and italics. Parts of something bigger, like articles, chapters and web pages, go in quotation marks. Whole works, like books, journals and websites, go in italics.
• Writing out “University Press”. MLA uses UP: Oxford UP.
• Listing every author of a source with three or more. MLA gives the first author and “et al.”.
• Numbering the list, or forgetting the full stop at the end of each entry.