The Modern Language Association's (MLA) style manual is an academic style guide. It prescribes a writing style most often used in English studies, comparative literature, foreign-language, literary criticism, and some other fields in the humanities.

MLA style uses a Works Cited Page to list works at the end of the paper. Brief parenthetical citations, which include an author and page (if applicable), are used within the text. These direct readers to work of the author on the list of works cited, and the page of the work where the information is located (e.g. (Smith 107) refers the reader to page 107 of the work made by someone named Smith).

Citation

Examples follow:

A book:

Conway, John Horton. On Numbers and Games. 2nd ed. Massachusetts: A K Peters, 2001.

An Encyclopedia or Dictionary:

Mohanty, Jitendra M. "Indian Philosophy." The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia. 15th ed. 1987.

A Periodical:

Rout, Kathleen. "Dream a Little Dream of Me: Mrs. May and the Bull in Flannery O'Connor's 'Greenleaf.'" Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979): 233-34.

A website:

"Plagiarism." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 22 Jul 2004, 10:55 UTC. 10 Aug 2004 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism>.

Note that MLA style calls for both the date of publication (or its latest update) and the date on which the information was retrieved.

Reference

• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, ISBN 0873529863.