In your librarian's experience, websites offering pre-written citations are offering terrible/incorrect citations. They're either out-of-date, just plain wrong, or not adhering to an actual citation style.

Common example, The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History offers great essays! They also offer a citation for each essay at the end, and you must edit it!

 

For example, the citation for the article on Art Nouveau is provided as:

Heilbrunn's citation with annotations added, marking out the "In" before the site name, the city, the http, the founding date of the site, and moving the article date up.

Their version:

Gontar, Cybele. “Art Nouveau.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/artn/hd_artn.htm (October 2006)

Correct MLA version:

Gontar, Cybele. “Art Nouveau.” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 2006, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/artn/hd_artn.htm.

 

What changed:

  • No "In (site name)." We use "in..." in APA style for anthology books, but not MLA.
  • Comma after the website name, not a period.
  • No place of publication.
  • The year the site was established is not officially part of the site name and does not otherwise need to be included.
  • Comma after the publisher.
  • The date of publication comes before the url, and we can (and should) abbreviate the month.
  • No http:// on the url in MLA.
  • Period at the end.

 

This is just one example, of course -- and of course, most websites don't offer you any citation at all! Any premade citation should be double-checked against an MLA resource like our online guide.