Cite a book in MLA 9
Books are the simplest source type to cite, but they still trip people up on edition numbers, editor vs author roles, and where the publisher city goes. MLA 9 (2021) has clear rules, and once you know them a book reference takes under a minute to format by hand.
MLA 9 rules for a book
- Author last name comes first, with initials or first name depending on the style.
- Year of publication goes right after the author block, in parentheses for author-date styles.
- Book title is italicized, sentence case for APA, title case for MLA/Chicago/Harvard.
- Publisher name appears after the title; no need for the publisher city in APA 7.
- Include the edition number in parentheses after the title if it is not the first edition.
- Publisher and year are separated by a comma; the publisher's city is omitted.
Worked example
MLA 9 · bookA real book formatted using the MLA 9 rules above.
Sagan, Carl *The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark*. Ballantine Books, 1995.
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Citation fields
MLA 9 book citation guide
The MLA 9 book entry as a filled-in template
In MLA 9 a book is the cleanest possible use of the nine-element container model, because a print book has almost no container at all — the book itself is the whole work. The core entry is Author. Title of the Book. Publisher, Publication Date. So a single-author book becomes Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. Ballantine Books, 1995. The author's name is inverted, surname first, and the title is italicised in full title case, which is the headline difference from APA's sentence case.
MLA 9 keeps the author's full first name rather than reducing it to an initial, so it is Sagan, Carl, not Sagan, C. For two authors you invert only the first name and give the second in normal order joined by and: Smith, Jane, and Robert Jones. For three or more authors, name the first inverted and add et al. The publisher's name is given in full, though you may drop business words like Company and Inc., and university presses are abbreviated to UP, as in Oxford UP.
Editions, editors, anthologies, and translations
If you are using anything other than the first edition, name it after the title: The Elements of Style. 4th ed., Longman, 2000. An edited book with no author opens with the editor's name followed by a label: Gilbert, Sandra M., editor. When you cite a translated work, the translator is an other contributor named after the title as translated by Gregory Rabassa. The order of these middle elements follows the nine-element sequence exactly, which is why learning the template pays off across every source type.
A book that is part of a numbered series or a multivolume set uses the number element: give the volume as vol. 2 before the publisher. For an e-book, MLA 9 treats the format as a version when it differs from print, so you may add e-book ed. after the title. The key discipline is to ask, for each piece of information, which of the nine elements it belongs to, and then place it in that order rather than guessing.
Page numbers and in-text citation
MLA's in-text style is author and page with no comma between them: (Sagan 42). This is the signature of MLA and the thing that distinguishes it instantly from APA's author-year. For a paraphrase or a quotation you give the page where the idea appears, and for a work with two authors you name both: (Smith and Jones 88). With three or more authors you use the first author and et al.: (Gilbert et al. 110).
If you have already named the author in a signal phrase, the parenthetical shrinks to just the page number: Sagan warns that pseudoscience spreads quickly (42). The first word of the Works Cited entry must match whatever you use in the parentheses, so an edited book cited by editor name must be referred to by that editor in text. Build the entry with the generator below, then verify the title is in italics and title case and that the author's full first name, not an initial, opens the entry.