MLA stands for Modern Language Association. According to its website, the MLA was founded in 1883 and works to support education in the humanities. MLA style citations are often used when writing in the humanities, which include art, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and more. As of November 2019, the most recent edition of the MLA style is the eighth edition, published in 2016.

When using MLA style, you should use in-text citations, also called parenthetical citations (shown below). You will also create a Works Cited page at the end of your paper.

For Journal Articles and Books

Include the author's last name and the page number (with no comma in between):

Receiving different versions of the same news "may hinder the chances of political moderation and compromise among the mass public” (Morris 726).

If you introduce the author of the source in the sentence, then you only need the page number:

Morris writes that receiving different versions of the same news "may hinder the chances of political moderation and compromise among the mass public" (726).

For Websites

If the article has an author, cite it like a journal article/book. (Just leave out the page number.) If the article has no author, use the title of the article (in quotes):

The initiative aims to "strengthen infrastructure, trade, and investment links between China and some 65 other countries" ("Belt and Road").

For in-text citations, you should shorten a long article title. Include the most important words. You want the title to be recognizable, so that when a reader looks at the Works Cited page, they can tell which source you're referencing. On the Works Cited page, you will need to include the whole title.

For Journal Articles and Books

Books:

Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. City of Publication, Publisher, Publication Date.

Journal Articles:

Last Name, First Name. "Title of Article." Title of Journal, Volume, Issue, Year, pages.

This is what the citation for the article from the in-text citations would look like:

Morris, Jonathan S. "Slanted Objectivity? Perceived Media Bias, Cable News Exposure, and Political Attitudes." Social Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 3, 2007, pp. 707-728.

For Websites

Last Name, First Name. "Title of Article." Name of Website, Date of publication, URL or DOI. Date of access.

If your article has no author, just begin with the article title. Cite it like the article below:

"Belt and Road Initiative." The World Bank, 29 March 2018, www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative. Accessed 19 Nov. 2019.

If your article has no publication date, leave it out. If you are using a journal article that you find online, you can add a URL/DOI and a date of access to the citation, like you would for a website.