In MLA style, all the sources you cite throughout the text of your paper are listed together in full in the Works Cited section, which comes after the main text of your paper.

Formatting the Works Cited Section

The top of the page, as the rest of your paper, should still include the right-justified header of your last name and the page number.

On the first line, the title of the page—“Works Cited”—should appear centered, and not italicized or bolded. Like the rest of your paper, this page should be double-spaced and have 1-inch margins (don't skip an extra line between citations).

Starting on the next line after the page title, your references should be listed in alphabetical order by author. Multiple sources by the same author should be listed chronologically by year within the same group.

Each reference should be formatted with what is called a hanging indent. This means the first line of each reference should be flush with the left margin (i.e., not indented), but the rest of that reference should be indented 0.5 inches further. Any word-processing program will let you format this automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand. (In Microsoft Word, for example, you simply highlight your citations, click on the small arrow right next to the word "Paragraph" on the home tab, and in the popup box choose "hanging indent" under the "Special" section. Click OK, and you're done.)

Formatting your citations

A correctly formatted Works Cited page, according to the MLA Handbook.

Constructing a Citation

The first step in building each individual citation is to determine the type of resource you are citing, since in each citation style formatting differs slightly based on source type. Some common types are a book, a chapter from a book, a journal article, an online book or article, an online video, a blog post, and personal communication such as an email or an interview you conducted. (You'll notice that "website" is not a category by itself. If the information you found is online, you want to determine if you're looking at an online book, an online article, or some other type of document.)

As an example, let's look in detail at the process of citing three particular sources in MLA style: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (i.e., a book by one author), Project Gutenberg's online text of the same book (i.e., an online book), and an online journal article about the book.

Print Sources

Author Name

You always want to start with the author information. You should present the author information in the following order and format: the author's last name (capitalized), a comma, the author's first name, a middle initial if given, and then a period:

• Conrad, Joseph.

Title of Source

After the author's name, you should include the title of the source in title case. For a book (or any other long work, like a play or film), the title is italicized; otherwise it should be enclosed in quotation marks.

• Heart of Darkness.

City of Publication

Next, you want to provide the location of the publisher's office. The location is generally a city, such as "London" or "New York, NY."

• London:

Publisher Name

Next, provide the publisher's name, followed by a comma:

• Everyman's Library,

Date of Publication

Next, you provide the year of the source's publication, followed by a period.

• 1993.

Medium of Publication

Finally, you provide the medium of publication (e.g., print, online, etc.), followed by a period.

• Print.

All together, then, the citation looks like this:

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Everyman's Library, 1993. Print.

Online Sources

Now let's take a look at the citation for the online version of the same book, available online through Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Much of the citation is the same, but the "access date" (i.e., the date you retrieved the information) is also included:

• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Project Gutenberg, November 2012. Web. 25 October 2015.

Note that you don't need to include the URL of the web page.

Importantly, if the work in question were a more standard web page—rather than the text of an entire standalone book—its title would be formatted in quotation marks rather than italicized. Let's pretend Conrad wrote an essay about his book for the sake of an example:

• Conrad, Joseph. "An Essay on Heart of Darkness." Project Gutenberg, November 2012. Web. 25 October 2015.

Journal Articles and Multiple Authors

• NooriBerzenji, Latef S., and Marwan Abdi. "The Image of the Africans in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart." Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business 5.4 (2013): 710–726. Print.

Much of this citation will look familiar to you now that you know the basics. Again, we start with the author information. This article has multiple authors, so we list them in the same order in which they are listed in the source. We list the first author in the same format as before (last name, first name, middle initial if provided); all author names following that should be listed in regular order (first name, middle initial if provided, last name), and all names should be separated by commas. The last author's name should also have the word "and" (not an ampersand, &) before it. Here we have only two authors, but if we had five, the "and" would come before the fifth author's last name, after the comma following the fourth author's name.

The date of publication and title are formatted the same. Note that even though MLA style says that the article title should not be italicized, the book titles within the article title are still italicized.

The new information here begins with citing the journal this article is from. Include the title of the journal in italicized title case (all major words capitalized, as in the title of a book):

• Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business

Then include the journal volume:

• 5

If the particular journal you're citing lists an issue number in addition to the volume number, as this one does, add a period immediately after the journal volume and follow it with the issue number.

• 5.4

Include the year of the source's publication in parentheses, followed by a colon:

• (2013):

List the page numbers of the article, followed by a period [note that the dash between the first and second numbers is an en-dash (–), not a hyphen (-) or em-dash (—)]:

• 710–726.

Finally, include the source medium, followed by a period:

• Print.

Multiple Publications by the Same Author

If you are referencing multiple publications by the same author (or group of authors), there is a special rule for denoting this. You should first order those articles alphabetically by source title in the Works Cited section. Then, replace the author's name (or list of names) with three hyphens, followed by a period, for all but the first entry by that author:

• Achenbach, Thomas M. "Bibliography of....
• ---. "School-Age...