MLA Works Cited Page: Format, Examples and Sample

An MLA Works Cited page is the alphabetized list at the end of your paper that gives full details for every source you cited. Start it on a new page, center the title “Works Cited” in plain text, double-space everything and give each entry a 0.5-inch hanging indent. This guide covers that page format, the core-elements template behind every entry, examples for the sources students cite most, the sorting rules and a finished sample page, all checked against the MLA 9th edition guidance on the MLA Style Center.

How to do an MLA Works Cited page: format and layout

The MLA Works Cited page follows the same layout as the rest of your paper, which is covered in our complete MLA citation guide. These are the settings to apply, in the order you will meet them:

1. New page. Begin the list on its own page after the last page of your text. Keep the one-inch margins and the running header with your last name and the page number in the top right corner, continuing the numbering of your paper.
2. Title. Type Works Cited at the top and center it. Do not bold it, italicize it, underline it or put it in quotation marks.
3. Alignment. Align the entries with the left margin. Only the title is centered.
4. Spacing. Double-space the whole page, with no extra blank line between entries.
5. Hanging indent. The first line of each entry sits flush left and every later line is indented 0.5 inch. The MLA Style Center explains how to set a hanging indent in Word, and Google Docs has the same option under Format, Align and indent, Indentation options.
6. Order. Alphabetize by the first element of each entry, which is usually the author’s last name.
7. Ending. Every entry finishes with a period, including entries that end in a URL.

What belongs on the page

A Works Cited page lists the sources you cited in the text, no more and no fewer. Every in-text citation needs a matching entry and every entry needs a matching in-text citation. Listing every source you cite is also how you credit other writers and avoid plagiarism. A bibliography or a works-consulted list also includes sources you read but never cited, so do not add those unless your instructor asks for that list by name.

What are the MLA core elements in a Works Cited entry?

MLA 9 builds every entry from the same nine elements in the same order. The MLA Style Center quick guide calls them the core elements. Each element is followed by the punctuation shown below, and the last one ends with a period.

Element	What to put there	Example
1. Author.	Last name first, then first name. Followed by a period.	Achebe, Chinua.
2. Title of source.	The specific work you used. Italics for a self-contained work such as a book or film, quotation marks for a part of a larger work such as an article. Followed by a period.	Things Fall Apart.
3. Title of container.	The larger whole that holds the source, such as a journal, a website or an edited book. Always italic, followed by a comma.	“The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science,
4. Other contributors.	Editors, translators, directors or performers, introduced by a role such as edited by or directed by.	Parasite. Directed by Bong Joon Ho,
5. Version.	An edition or a named version of the work.	4th ed.,
6. Number.	Volume and issue numbers, or an episode number.	vol. 211, no. 4481,
7. Publisher.	The organization that produced or distributed the source.	Anchor Books,
8. Publication date.	Day, month, year in that order, using the most precise date you can find.	30 Jan. 1981,
9. Location.	Page range, DOI or URL. Use pp. for a range and p. for one page.	pp. 453-58.

Put together, the nine elements in order look like this:

Author. “Title of Source.” Title of Container, Other Contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication Date, Location.

Which elements to leave out

The template is a checklist, not a form you must fill in. Include only the elements that exist for your source. A novel has no volume number, a web page often has no author and a periodical needs no publisher. MLA says to omit the publisher when the container and the publisher share a name or when the source is a periodical, so a newspaper article ends up much shorter than a book entry.

A source can also sit inside two containers. A journal article read in a database has the journal as its first container and the database as its second. Add the second container after the location of the first, in italics, followed by the DOI or URL of the database page.

How do you cite common sources in MLA Works Cited format?

Each row below shows the pattern and then a finished entry. Publication details in the examples are illustrative, so copy the details from the edition you actually used.

Source type	Pattern and example
Book	Last, First. Title. Publisher, Year. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Anchor Books, 1994.
Book, two authors	Only the first author is inverted. Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Longman, 2000.
Chapter in an edited book	Last, First. “Chapter Title.” Book Title, edited by First Last, Publisher, Year, pp. 00-00.
Journal article with a DOI	Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science, vol. 211, no. 4481, 30 Jan. 1981, pp. 453-58, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683.
Web page, no author	“How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style?” MLA Style Center, Modern Language Association, 13 Aug. 2025, style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai-updated-revised/.
Film	Parasite. Directed by Bong Joon Ho, Neon, 2019.

These rows cover the basics. Our guides on how to cite a book and how to cite a website in an essay go further into the two source types students cite most.

For a DOI, write it as a full link beginning with https://doi.org/. For an ordinary web address, MLA drops the https:// prefix, as in the web page entry above. Pick one style for URLs and use it for every entry.

Three or more authors are shortened to the first author plus et al., as in Smith, John, et al. A group author such as a company or a university is written out in full in the author slot.

How to cite generative AI in an MLA Works Cited entry

The MLA Style Center revised its generative AI guidance in August 2025. Cite the tool whenever you paraphrase, quote or build on content it generated. The template maps like this:

Element	What MLA asks for
Author	Leave it out. MLA does not recommend treating the AI tool as an author.
Title of source	Describe what was generated, usually by quoting a description of your prompt.
Title of container	The name of the tool, in italics.
Version	The model name or number, as specifically as you can state it.
Publisher	The company that made the tool.
Date	The date the content was generated.
Location	A stable, shareable link to the conversation. If the tool cannot create one, give the general URL of the tool.

A finished entry follows this shape, with your own shared link in place of the bracketed text:

“Describe the symbolism of nature in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” prompt. ChatGPT, GPT-4o, OpenAI, 13 Aug. 2025, chatgpt.com/share/[your-link-ID].

AI tools can invent sources or summarize real ones badly. If a response points to a secondary source you want to use, open that source and cite it directly instead of citing the AI summary.

What to do when an MLA Works Cited entry has missing information

Students who also use APA often carry n.d. across, but MLA does not use it. The fix for each missing piece is different:

Missing piece	What to do in MLA
No author	Start the entry with the title of the source and alphabetize by that title. The in-text citation uses the same shortened title.
No publication date	Leave the date out. Do not write n.d. If readers might need it, add an access date at the very end, for example Accessed 12 Nov. 2026.
No page numbers	Leave the page element out. Online articles are located by the URL or DOI.
No stable URL	Look for a permalink or a DOI. If the source has neither, cite it without a location.

How to alphabetize an MLA Works Cited page

Sorting is easy to get wrong on a long Works Cited page. These are the rules that decide where each entry lands:

Situation	Rule
Normal order	Sort by the first word of the entry, which is the last name of the first author.
No author	Sort by the first main word of the title. Skip A, An and The at the start.
Same surname	Sort by first name, so Achebe, Chinua comes before Achebe, Zeta.
Same author, several works	Give the name in the first entry only. Start each later entry with three hyphens and a period, and sort those entries by title.
Solo and group entries	List the author’s solo work before entries where the same person is the first of several authors.
Titles and degrees	Leave out Dr., PhD and similar. Keep suffixes such as Jr., as in King, Martin Luther, Jr.

MLA Works Cited sample page

This is how a finished MLA Works Cited page reads. Note how the Achebe entries share one author line, how the AI entry and the web page entry sit among the author entries because they begin with a title, and how each entry hangs 0.5 inch. As above, check the publication details against your own copy before you reuse an entry.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. Anchor Books, 1989.

—. Things Fall Apart. Anchor Books, 1994.

“Describe the symbolism of nature in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” prompt. ChatGPT, GPT-4o, OpenAI, 13 Aug. 2025, chatgpt.com/share/[your-link-ID].

“How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style?” MLA Style Center, Modern Language Association, 13 Aug. 2025, style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai-updated-revised/.

Parasite. Directed by Bong Joon Ho, Neon, 2019.

Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Longman, 2000.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science, vol. 211, no. 4481, 30 Jan. 1981, pp. 453-58, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683.

To see how the same page sits at the end of a complete paper, read our MLA format example. If you would rather not assemble each entry by hand, the MLA citation generator builds the entries from a URL, DOI or title, and you can then check them against the template above.

What are the most common MLA Works Cited page mistakes?

Mistake	How to fix it
Bold, italic or quoted title	Type Works Cited in plain text, centered.
First line indented instead of the rest	Use a hanging indent, so only the second and later lines move in.
Extra space between entries	Keep double spacing throughout with no blank line between entries.
Sorted by first name or by order of use	Sort alphabetically by the last name or the first word of the title.
n.d. for a missing date	Delete the date element. Add an access date only if it helps the reader.
Sources listed but never cited	Remove them, or rename the page if your instructor wants a bibliography.
Entry missing its final period	End every entry with a period, even after a URL.
Author set to an AI tool	Start with the quoted prompt description and name the tool as the container.

Frequently asked questions

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