Citing Common Electronic Sources--MLA

 

Works Cited entries for:

 

An entire Web site
Begin with the name of the author or corporate author (if known) and the title of the site, underlined (or italicized). Then give the names of any editors, the date of publication or last update, the name of any sponsoring organization, the date of access, and the URL in angle brackets. Provide as much of this information as is available.

WITH AUTHOR

Peterson, Susan Lynn. The Life of Martin Luther. 1999. 9 Mar. 2001
     <http://pweb.netcom.com/~supeters/luther.htm>.

WITH CORPORATE (GROUP) AUTHOR

United States. Environmental Protection Agency. Values and Functions
     of Wetlands. 25 May 1999. 24 Mar. 2001 <http://www.epa.gov-owow/
     wetlands/facts/fact2.html>.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

Margaret Sanger Papers Project. 18 Oct. 2000. History Dept., New York
     U. 3 Apr. 2001 <http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/>.


NOTE: If the site has no title, substitute a description, such as "Home page," for the title. Do not underline the words or put them in quotation marks.

Block, Marylaine. Home page. 5 Mar. 2001. 12 Apr. 2001
     <http://www.marylaine.com>.


Short work from a Web site
"Short" works are those that appear in quotation marks in MLA style: articles, poems, and other documents that are not book length. For a short work from a Web site, include as many of the following elements as apply and as are available:


Usually at least some of these elements will not apply or will be unavailable. For example, in the following model, no date of publication was available. (The date given is the date on which the researcher accessed the source.)

WITH AUTHOR

Shiva, Vandana. "Bioethics: A Third World Issue."
     NativeWeb. 24 Feb. 2001 <http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/
     shiva.html>.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

"Media Giants." The Merchants of Cool. 2001. PBS Online. 7 Mar. 2001
     <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/
     cool/giants>.

 

Work from a subscription service (online databases)
Libraries pay for access to databases through subscription services such as Lexis-Nexis and ProQuest Direct. When you retrieve a work from a subscription service, give as much of the following information as is available:

Here is a model for an article retrieved through Expanded Academic ASAP. The source being cited is a scholarly article paginated by issue (see also item 22).

Fitzgerald, Jill. "How Will Bilingual/ESL Programs in Literacy Change
     in the Next Millennium?" Reading Research Quarterly 35.4
     (2000). Expanded Academic ASAP. InfoTrac. Salem State Coll. Lib.,
     Salem, MA. 16 Feb. 2001.


If you know the URL of the subscription service, add it at the end of the entry.

NOTE: When you access a work through a personal subscription service such as America Online, give the information about the source, followed by the name of the service, the date of access, and the keyword used to retrieve the source.

Conniff, Richard. "The House That John Built." Smithsonian Feb. 2001.
     America Online. 11 Mar. 2001. Keyword: Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Handling In-text Citations of Internet Sources

 

Page number unknown
You may omit the page number if a work lacks page numbers, as is the case with many Web sources. Although printouts from Web sites usually show page numbers, different printers may provide different page breaks; for this reason, MLA recommends treating such sources as unpaginated.

The California Highway Patrol opposes restrictions on the use of phones while driving, claiming that distracted drivers can already be prosecuted (Jacobs).

When the pages of a Web source are stable (as in PDF files), however, supply a page number in your in-text citation.

NOTE: If a Web source uses paragraph or section numbers (as some online scholarly journals do), give the abbreviation "par." or "sec." in the parentheses: (Smith, par. 4).  If the source does not have paragraph designations in its text, no paragraph or page number need be provided.

Substitute Internet text divisions for page numbers

The MLA Handbook requires that you identify the location of any cited information as precisely as possible in parentheses. Because Internet sources are rarely marked with page numbers, you will not always be able to show exactly where cited material comes from. If a source has internal divisions, use these instead of page numbers in your citation. Be sure to use divisions inherent in the document and not those provided by your browsing software.

A text reference to a source with divisions may appear in the text along with the author's name or be placed in parentheses after a quotation, paraphrase, or summary.

As TyAnna Herrington notes in her Introduction, "Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital provides another welcome not only into an age of technological ubiquity, but into a way of 'being' with technology."

"Negroponte's uncomplicated, personal tone fools the reader into a sense that his theses are simplistic" (Herrington "Introduction").

Information taken from Diana Hacker, Research and Documentation Online http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/humanities/english.html and Andrew Harnack, Online!: a reference guide to using internet sources, http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite5.html