CitationWithSourcesHow formats are sourced

MLA Citation Generator (9th Edition)

Fill in what you know about the source and get the MLA 9th edition entry plus its matching in-text form. Blank fields are simply left out rather than leaving stray punctuation behind.

Authors

No personal author? Leave these blank and use the organisation field below.

Reference entry

Baniya, Sweta, and Stuart Weech. "Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning." Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 11–16. doi:10.5703/1288284316979

In-text

(Baniya and Weech 11)

Formatted as MLA 9th edition. Italics are shown as italics here and stripped when you copy, so the text pastes cleanly into a word processor where you can re-apply them.

A worked example

A two-author journal article with a DOI, formatted as MLA 9th edition. This is generated by the same code the tool above uses, so it is never out of step with the generator.

Reference

Baniya, Sweta, and Stuart Weech. "Data and experience design: Negotiating community-oriented digital research with service-learning." Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 11–16. doi:10.5703/1288284316979

In-text

(Baniya and Weech 11)

The same style applied to a single-author book, where the fields available are quite different — no volume, no issue, no DOI, but a publisher instead:

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin, 1987.

In-text: (Gleick)

Where these rules come from

Citation formats are only useful if they match what the style body actually publishes, so each rule here is transcribed from a cited source rather than written from memory:

Frequently Asked Questions

How many authors before MLA uses “et al.”?

Three. One author is inverted as Last, First. Two authors invert only the first and join them with “and”. With three or more, MLA gives the first author followed by et al. and stops there.

What is a “container” in MLA 9?

The larger whole that holds your source — a journal holding an article, an anthology holding a short story, a streaming service holding an episode. MLA's core-elements template asks for the container's title in italics after the source's own title, which is why the same fields describe very different kinds of source.

Why does MLA write “vol.” and “no.” instead of just numbers?

MLA labels its elements rather than relying on position and punctuation alone, so a reader can tell a volume from an issue without knowing the convention. The same instinct gives you “pp.” before a page range.

Where do these formatting rules come from?

Every rule on this page is transcribed from the published MLA 9th edition guidance listed in the sources box below, and the site's test suite reproduces those sources' own worked examples exactly. If a change ever stopped matching a real published citation, the tests would fail.

Should I check the output before submitting it?

Yes. A generator handles the common shapes of a source well, but real bibliographies contain awkward cases — a chapter in a translated edition, a report with a corporate author and a series number, a source with no date. Treat the output as a well-formed draft and check anything unusual against your style manual or your institution's guidance.

Other citation styles

Switching styles changes more than punctuation — name order, date position and title capitalisation all move, so the same source looks quite different in each.