Free tool
MLA citation generator
Get an MLA 9th edition Works Cited entry and in-text citation from a DOI or a title. No sign-in, and nothing you type is stored.
Generate an MLA citation
What MLA style is for
MLA style comes from the Modern Language Association. It is used in literature, languages, cultural studies and much of the humanities, where readers want to find the exact passage you mean.
In the text you give the author's surname and the page number, with no year. The list at the end is called Works Cited and is in alphabetical order by first author.
Example: a journal article in MLA
Reference list entry
In-text citation
(Poropat)
The generator gives the author part of the in-text citation. Add the page you are citing yourself: (Poropat 330). With two authors, use and: (Smith and Jones 12). With three or more, give the first author and et al.
What it can and can't find
The generator looks works up in Crossref and OpenAlex, two large indexes of published research. Journal articles and conference papers with a DOI are covered best.
Websites, most books without a DOI, reports, theses and very new work are often missing, or have thin records. For those, choose “Enter details manually” and type the details from the source itself.
Index records can be wrong or incomplete: a missing issue number, a title in capitals, an author's name spelled another way. Check each citation against the source before you hand it in.
FAQ
- Is the citation generator free?
- Yes. You don't need an account. If you send a lot of searches in a few minutes, the tool asks you to wait a moment before the next one.
- Do you store what I search for?
- No. Your search goes to our server, which looks it up in Crossref and OpenAlex and sends the citations back to your browser. We don't save the search or the results.
- Does it use AI?
- No. It doesn't use a language model. It takes the published record for the work and formats it with standard Citation Style Language (CSL) style files, the same kind many reference managers use.
- Why can't it find my source?
- Crossref and OpenAlex cover journal articles well, but websites, many books, reports, theses and very recent work are often missing. Try the DOI if the work has one, or add an author's surname to the title. If it still isn't found, choose “Enter details manually” and type its author, date, title and the other details from the source.
- Which edition of MLA does it follow?
- The 9th edition of the MLA Handbook, the current one.
- Why is there no page number in the in-text citation?
- MLA in-text citations point to the page you are quoting or paraphrasing, and only you know which page that is. Add it after the author's name, with no comma.