Cite Your Sources in MLA 9th: Get Help

Dates in your Works Cited list should be formatted like this: Day Month Year. Month names should be abbreviated using the list below. 
Example: 17 Oct. 2021.

For publication dates, include as much information as the source provides. This may be a full date, only the month and year, a season (such as Spring 2019), or just a publication year.

Month Abbreviations

In your Works Cited list, abbreviate months as follows:

January = Jan.
February = Feb.
March = Mar.
April = Apr.
May = May
June = June
July = July
August = Aug.
September = Sept.
October = Oct.
November = Nov.
December = Dec.

Spell out months fully in the body of your paper.

Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, are unique numbers or hyperlinks assigned to some online resources, such as journal articles, to make them easier to find.

If a DOI is provided for a source, include it at the end of your citation after any page numbers. In your Works Cited list, you should always format a DOI as a URL beginning with "https://doi.org/" followed immediately by the DOI number.

Example: For DOI "10.5642/jhummath.20170120," the URL version would be: https://doi.org/10.5642/jhummath.20170120

If no DOI is provided but a permalink or stable link is present, you can use that instead.

If a source is missing information that you need for your Works Cited citation, you can skip that element and move on to the next element in the citation.

Examples: Some sources don't have an author; in this case, we skip the author and start our citation with the title. Most academic journals are published in volumes and issues, but some only have volumes; in this case, we list the volume number and skip the issue number. 

If you're not sure what type of source you're working with, don't worry! This is a very common challenge. Check out our page on Identifying Source Types.

Works Cited List: To cite two or more works by the same author, give the name in the first entry only. For subsequent works by the same author, replace the author's name with three hyphens followed by a period (---.), which signifies that the name is the same as the preceding entry. Alphabetize works with the same author by title. 

In-Text Citations: To distinguish multiple works by the same author, add a comma followed by a shortened version of the title (usually the first 2-4 words) between the author name and the page number. Example: (Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera 38). Alternately, you can mention the author and title in the sentence, and then only include the page number. 

If you are citing a single page, use "p." If you are citing multiple pages, use "pp."

Example: If an article runs from page 10 to page 15, your citation should say "pp. 10-15" because it covers multiple pages. If it's a short article that only appears on page 11, your citation should say "p. 11".