MLA Style (9th ed.)

Follow the usual MLA rules about authors:

• 1 author: Last, First.
• 2 authors: Last1, First1, and First2 Last2.
• 3+ authors: Last1, First1, et al.

MLA 9th ed. 5.6 - 5.8

First Container

This is the name of the journal, magazine, or website that contains the article.

Second Container

Include the name of the database through which you found the article, in italics, as the name of a second container. If you went through the library database pages, and especially if you had to enter your barcode number for access, you're probably in a database.

Used for works that are published in a series, most typically. Magazines (and the more scholarly counterpart, journals) are numbered for each time that comes out in each year that it's published.

Abbreviate volume to vol.

Don't label "issue" -- just say no. #.

You can exclude any business labels in the publisher name -- Inc, Ltd, LLC, and so on.

If a publisher is named Something & Someone, write it in your citation as: Something and Someone  [bolded for emphasis].

You can abbreviate publisher names like Oxford University Press to Oxford UP. (Unfortunately doesn't work for University of Something Press names...)

Big publishers often have smaller publishers under them (called imprints). In this case, only name the imprint in your citation, as it is the entity that is most directly responsible for putting the book out.

MLA 9th ed. 5.64 - 5.66

Use the date as provide by the article, whether that's a year only, a season and year, or month-day-year.

MLA formats dates as DD Mon. YYYY.

Abbreviate all months except May, June, July.

MLA recommends including the URL or DOI number at the end. If using a URL, especially in a library database, look for a "permalink" option to ensure that the link won't expire in the future.

• When you're adding the URL, delete the http:// portion at the beginning (unless you're told otherwise).
• When using a DOI, do include https://doi.org/... before the number (with the http)(yes, really).
• Links should not be live/clickable/underlined (unless you're told otherwise).
• Do not use a url shortener like bit.ly.
• Excessively long links (longer than 3 lines) may be truncated to just the main domain.

MLA 9th ed. 5.93 - 5.98

Two Authors

Frimer, Jeremy A., and Linda J. Skitka. “Are Politically Diverse Thanksgiving Dinners Shorter than Politically Uniform Ones?” PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 10, Oct. 2020, pp. 1–27. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239988.

Mixon, Franklin G., Jr., and Cody B. Ward. "Tragedy Or Treat? Halloween And The Trick-Or-Treating Commons." Journal for Economic Educators, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, pp. 28-32, https://libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/jfee/article/view/1524.

Three or More Authors

Margolin, Sara J., et al. “E-Readers, Computer Screens, or Paper: Does Reading Comprehension Change Across Media Platforms?” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 27, no. 4, July 2013, pp. 512–519. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2930.