Professional and Technical Writing/Documenting Your Sources/MLA Style In-Text Citations

MLA Style In-Text Citations

Unlike the APA style, the MLA style considers both author's name the specific page or pages where the information was found. The author name and page(s) are enclosed in parentheses with no punctuation in between them. The information inside the parentheses should be placed inside the normal sentence punctuation. Page numbers are not needed if a whole work is being cited. A hyphen is used to separate page ranges. In large numbers, only the last two digits are needed unless more are necessary (240-59, but (120-200).

Example: English Springer Spaniels are great hunters (Smith 10–12).

• If the author's name is used in the sentence, give only the page numbers in parentheses.

Example: According to Smith, English Springer Spaniels are great hunters (10-12).

• If no author is listed, use the article title or book title, followed by the page number(s).

Example: (AKC Dog Book 10–12)

• If more than sources by the same author are cited and they have the same publication year, differ the two citations by adding a few words from the title following the author's name and a comma.