The MLA Works Cited page can be found in any research paper or essay in MLA style. It contains all of the sources and works that you have cited in your paper. This page is important because it simplifies the documentation by allowing you to make shorter citations for the sources in your text.

How to format your MLA Works Cited Page:

1. The top of the page should read “Works Cited.”
2. All MLA Works Cited pages should include a header on the upper right-hand corner that contains the last name of the student and the page number of the Works Cited page.
3. All the MLA citations in your Works Cited page should be in double space.
4. All of your entries in your list should be alphabetized according to the author’s last name. If no author is cited, then use the first main word of the title of the work.’ Begin with the title if the work does not specify an author.
5. Every entry included in the list should end with a period. A period is important because it tells your reader that the entry has been completed.
6. Your MLA Works Cited page should be indented by 1 inch on the left and right side. It is the standard margin.
7. All entries should be in hanging indent. That means that entries that have two or more lines should have an additional ½ inch margin from the left.

Formatting the content of your MLA Work Cited page:

1. Titles of books and journals should be in italics.
2. On the other hand, titles of articles, book chapters, essays and short stories should be written with “quotation marks.”
3. If there is more than one author, only the first author is listed in the Last Name, First Name format. The other authors will be listed in the First Name Last Name format.
4. Include the URL of the website only if the citation will not easily lead back to the Works Cited.
5. If the work is from an electronic database (e.g. Jstor, EBSCOhost) then include the database title in your entry and identify the medium as Web.
6. There are many publications that can now be found online and some of the works do not include all of your needed information for your entry. In that case, if there is no publisher, publication date or page numbers, you can include use the following:

n.p. for no publisher

n.d. for no date

n. pag. for no page numbers

All of the citations in your MLA Works Cited pages should have a corresponding in-text citation in the research paper. The in-text citation could be in parenthesis, quotes or in any reference to a published work in your paper. You should remember that if the there is a citation in your list that does not have a counterpart in your research paper or essay, it would taken as an improperly listed source. On the other hand, any mentioned source in your paper that is not included in the list of sources in your MLA Works Cited page is also a problem. Any of these oversights committed can lead to allegations of plagiarism.

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