Citation Help & Academic Honesty

Unless your instructor provides other formatting guidelines, follow these rules to format your works cited list:

• Entries arranged alphabetically by the first element in the citation
• ½ inch hanging indent (for each entry, the first line aligns with the left margin while all subsequent lines are indented half an inch from the left margin)
• Double-spaced

Each entry in your works cited list should include these elements in this order (separated by the punctuation marks shown here):

Author. Title of source. Title of container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, date, location.

Elements may be excluded if they are not applicable to the source, but you should make every effort to ensure that your citations are as complete as possible.

Author
Name formatting for sources with…

1 author: Last Name, First Name (e.g., Smith, Adam)

2 authors: Last Name, First Name and First Name Last Name (e.g., Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels)

3+ authors: Last Name, First Name, et al. (e.g., Burdick, Anne, et al.)

For the purpose of MLA citations, a source’s author is the person or group primarily responsible for producing the source or the aspect of the source that your research focused on. If the role of that person or group was something other than creating the source’s main content, follow the name with a label that describes that role.

Examples of these labels include editor (when you’re citing an entire volume of essays or anthology), translator (when your focus is on the translation), performer (film or television actors, musicians), director, and screenwriter.

Title of source
If a source is part of a larger work, its title is placed in quotation marks. For example:

• An article from a journal, newspaper, or magazine
• An essay, story, or poem from a collection
• An episode of a television series
• A page from a website
• A song from an album

If a source is self-contained and independent, its title is italicized.

Capitalize the first word, last word, and all principal words in titles and subtitles. Do NOT capitalize the following parts of speech when they fall in the middle of a title or subtitle:

• Articles (a, an, the)
• Prepositions (e.g., against, as between, in, of, to)
• Coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet)

Title of container
For a source that is part of a larger work, that larger work is considered to be its container. The title of a container is italicized and follows the same capitalization rules as the title of a source.

Other contributors
Names of other contributors should be included if their participation in creating the work is important to your research or to the identification of the work. Each name should be preceded by a description of the contributor’s role. Common examples include adapted by, directed by, edited by, illustrated by, introduction by, narrated by, performance by, and translated by.

For sources with containers, if the other contributors did not work on the container as a whole, they should be listed before the title of the container.

Version
If more than one version of a source has been released, identify the version you used for your research in the citation. For example:

• revised ed.
• updated ed.
• expanded ed.
• 7th ed.
• unabridged version
• director’s cut