Wednesday 30 August 2017

MLA Referencing Style for Works Cited Lists


MLA Referencing Style for Works Cited Lists


The final step in effective academic referencing and citation is to have a list of resources or a bibliography at the end of your document. The word bibliography typically refers to a list of only books, which is why the more general headings List of Resources or Works Cited are usually used for essays and dissertations.

The list should be given as an appendix and started on a new page. You should arrange the references alphabetically based on the surname of the author, so that it is easy for the reader to find more details on a citation that they notice within your written work.

A list of references contains much more information than the in-text citations. This is so that your readers can have everything they need in order to find the original sources which you consulted if they wish to do so. A brief guide to the various styles of referencing for the list of resources will be given below.

MLA Style
Your reference list entries should follow the format of:
·         Author’s surname followed by their first name (and optionally middle names or initials where needed
·         The title of the text in either quote marks or italics, depending on whether it is a short work or a larger work respectively
·         The publisher’s name
·         The date of publication
For example, a simple book entry for John Milton’s Paradise Lost will look as follows:

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Penguin Classics, 2003.

Notice the placement of commas and periods. Periods are placed after the author’s details, and again after the book’s title. Commas separate the author’s first name from their surname, and the year of publication from the publisher’s name.

For books with two authors, give the first (primary) author’s surname, a comma and the first name, and follow that with the second author’s first name and last name in this format:

Rollins, Jacqueline, and Peter Johnson.

For three or more authors, use the Latin term “et al.”:

Jansen, Keith, et al. The Vacation. Bloomberg, 1977.

If you are using an article within a book, or any shorter work which appears as part of a larger collection like a poem in an anthology or a scholarly paper within a journal, then you will include both the name of the short work in quotation marks as well as the name of the long work in italics. You’ll also have to include the pages that the short work appears on, if these are available:

Titus, Joe. “The Raging Sea.” Poems About Water. Purple Publishers, 2006, pp. 25-33.

Note the use of “pp” in front of the page numbers. For a single page, the letter “p” is used, but for multiple pages, “pp” should precede the numbers.

For scholarly journals, you can also include the edition details, such as the volume and the number of the journal:

Azua, Maria. “Phenomenology in the Workplace.” Journal of Workplace Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 5, 2003, pp.38-77.

For electronic sources such as websites, you can keep the same format and simply leave out any information which is not available, such as author’s name or date of publication.

You should include the URL of any sites that you visit in place of page numbers, and the date that you accessed the information.

Rice, Harvey. “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Were Doing Wrong.” FuzzBeed, 22 Apr. 2017, www.fuzzbeed.com/10_things.html. Accessed 15 May 2017.


In this example, the date of publication is included after the title of the website, and the date that you accessed it is included at the end. For online scholarly articles, you can use the usual format given for physical journal articles, and simply include the URL and the date you accessed it.