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MLA Citation Guide: Works Cited List

This guide shows you how to cite using MLA.

Sample Paper

Quick Rules for an MLA Works Cited List

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called a Works Cited list.

Here are eight quick rules for this list:

  1. Start a new page for your Works Cited list (e.g., if your paper is 4 pages long, start your Works Cited list on page 5).
  2. Centre the title, Works Cited, at the top of the page and do not bold or underline it. Look for the alignment option in Word.
  3. Double-space the list.
  4. Start the first line of each citation at the left margin; each subsequent line should be indented (also known as a "hanging indent").
  5. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
  6. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first name followed by a period.
  7. Italicize the titles of full works: books, audiovisual material,websites.
  8. Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.