MLA Citation Generator

Create MLA 9th edition citations for free. Paste a DOI, ISBN or link, or fill in the form, and get the works cited entry and the in-text citation formatted to 9th edition (2021). No sign-up, nothing to install.

Style: MLA 9th edition

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Works Cited (0)

Your citations appear here, formatted in MLA 9th edition. They are saved in this browser only: nothing is sent to us, and no account is needed.

    Paste and cite

    DOI, ISBN, PubMed, arXiv, YouTube or any web page. The details come from Crossref, Open Library, NCBI and the page itself.

    Nothing missing

    Every field your style needs is checked, and gaps are flagged in amber before they cost you marks.

    10,863 styles

    The official Citation Style Language files, the same ones Zotero and Mendeley use, plus a dedicated AGLC4 engine.

    MLA rules students get wrong

    MLA 9th edition, 9th edition (2021). Used in: English, literature, languages and the humanities.

    • Entries follow the core elements: author, title, container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, date, location.
    • In-text citations give the author and page with no comma: (Kahneman 20).
    • Three or more authors become the first author and "et al."
    • Titles of whole works are italicised; titles of parts, such as articles and chapters, go in quotation marks.
    • Give the URL without https:// for web sources; a DOI is preferred where there is one.

    MLA examples for every source

    Each example below was formatted by this generator, so it is exactly what you will get.

    Journal article

    Works Cited entry

    LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, May 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

    In-text citation

    (LeCun et al. 437)
    Book

    Works Cited entry

    Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

    In-text citation

    (Kahneman 20)
    Chapter in an edited book

    Works Cited entry

    Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, edited by Daniel Kahneman et al., Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 3–20.

    In-text citation

    (Tversky and Kahneman 4)
    Web page

    Works Cited entry

    “Depression.” World Health Organization, 31 Mar. 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression.

    In-text citation

    (“Depression”)
    YouTube video

    Works Cited entry

    3Blue1Brown. “But What Is a Neural Network? | Deep Learning Chapter 1.” YouTube, 5 Oct. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk.

    In-text citation

    (3Blue1Brown, 4:15)
    Podcast episode

    Works Cited entry

    Glass, Ira. “Amusement Park.” This American Life, episode 443, WBEZ Chicago, 12 Aug. 2011, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park.

    In-text citation

    (Glass, 12:30)
    Lecture or speech

    Works Cited entry

    Pausch, Randy. “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Lecture. Journeys Lecture Series, 18 Sept. 2007, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo.

    In-text citation

    (Pausch, 10:05)
    Newspaper article

    Works Cited entry

    Roose, Kevin. “A Conversation with Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled.” The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html.

    In-text citation

    (Roose)
    Magazine article

    Works Cited entry

    Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, vol. 302, no. 1, July 2008, pp. 56–63.

    In-text citation

    (Carr 57)
    Report

    Works Cited entry

    World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All. World Health Organization, 2022, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338.

    In-text citation

    (World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All)
    Thesis or dissertation

    Works Cited entry

    Nash, John Forbes. Non-Cooperative Games. 1950. Princeton University, PhD dissertation.

    In-text citation

    (Nash)
    Conference paper

    Works Cited entry

    Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention Is All You Need.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30, 2017, pp. 5998–6008.

    In-text citation

    (Vaswani et al.)
    Dataset

    Works Cited entry

    Fisher, R. A. “Iris.” UCI Machine Learning Repository, 1988, https://doi.org/10.24432/C56C76.

    In-text citation

    (Fisher)
    Film

    Works Cited entry

    Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010.

    In-text citation

    (Inception, 1:12:05)
    Software or app

    Works Cited entry

    R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Version 4.3.1, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2023, https://www.R-project.org/.

    In-text citation

    (R Core Team)
    ChatGPT or other AI

    Works Cited entry

    “Is the Left Brain Right Brain Divide Real or a Metaphor?” ChatGPT, Mar 14 version, OpenAI, 14 Mar. 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

    In-text citation

    (“Is the Left Brain Right Brain Divide Real or a Metaphor?”)
    Dictionary or encyclopedia entry

    Works Cited entry

    Merriam-Webster. “Culture.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture. Accessed 28 Sept. 2026.

    In-text citation

    (Merriam-Webster)
    Preprint (arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv)

    Works Cited entry

    Devlin, Jacob, et al. “BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.” Preprint arXiv:1810.04805, arXiv, 11 Oct. 2018, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1810.04805.

    In-text citation

    (Devlin et al.)
    Blog post

    Works Cited entry

    Karpathy, Andrej. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks.” Andrej Karpathy Blog, 21 May 2015, https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/.

    In-text citation

    (Karpathy)
    Court case

    Works Cited entry

    Mabo v Queensland (No 2). 175 CLR 1, 1992.

    In-text citation

    (Mabo v Queensland (No 2) 42)
    Legislation

    Works Cited entry

    Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

    In-text citation

    (Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), sec. 6)

    Other citation styles

    How to cite every kind of source

    Finished the paper? Check it.

    Paste your paper into the citation checker: every in-text citation is matched to your works cited, the style's rules are checked, and most mistakes fix in one click.

    Free MLA citation checker

    Quoting a video, lecture or podcast?

    Most styles want the exact words and the timestamp. Get the full transcript with timestamps, search it for the line you need, then cite it here.

    Free YouTube transcript generator

    Questions

    Which edition of MLA does this follow?

    MLA 9th edition: 9th edition (2021), formatted from the modern-language-association style in the Citation Style Language repository. It is checked against 13 reference examples from the MLA Style Center: 4 match character for character and 9 differ (journal article, chapter in an edited book, web page, newspaper article, thesis or dissertation, conference paper, podcast episode, YouTube video and film), so check those source types against the manual.

    Who uses MLA?

    English, literature, languages and the humanities.

    Is the MLA generator free?

    Yes. No account, no limit, and every export (Word, BibTeX, RIS, CSL-JSON) is included. Your list stays in your browser.

    Where do the details come from when I paste a DOI or link?

    DOIs come from Crossref and DataCite, ISBNs from Open Library and Google Books, PubMed IDs from NCBI, arXiv IDs from arXiv, YouTube links from YouTube, and web pages from the citation metadata the publisher embeds in the page (the same tags Google Scholar reads). Pages that carry no metadata are filled in as far as possible and the gaps are flagged for you.

    Can I export to Word, Zotero, EndNote or LaTeX?

    Yes. Copy the list with its italics into Word or Google Docs, download a formatted .docx, or export BibTeX for LaTeX, RIS for EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley, or CSL-JSON.

    How do I cite a quote from a video or lecture?

    Add the timestamp in the pinpoint box and paste the quote: the generator formats both for your style. To find the exact wording and the time it was said, get the full transcript of the video with timestamps first.

    Citations are formatted by citeproc-js by Frank Bennett (CPAL-1.0, or AGPL-1.0), the engine behind Zotero and Mendeley, running the official Citation Style Language styles (10,863 styles, commit 2e93558) and locales (commit a89adec), used under CC BY-SA 3.0. AGLC4 citations use the LexIntellect AGLC4 engine, checked against the Guide's worked examples. Always check a citation against the manual or your institution's guide before you submit.