Cite a journal article in MLA 9
Journal articles carry the highest citation weight in academic work, so MLA 9 (2021) is strict about volume, issue, page range, and the DOI. Get the punctuation wrong and a marker will spot it instantly. The rules below cover the exact order and the small fields students miss most often.
MLA 9 rules for a journal article
- Article title is plain text (or in quotes for MLA/Chicago), journal name is italicized.
- Volume number is italicized in APA, plain in MLA/Chicago/Harvard.
- Issue number goes in parentheses immediately after the volume.
- Page range uses an en dash (e.g., 123-145), no spaces, no double hyphens.
- Include the DOI as a full URL (https://doi.org/...) if one exists, otherwise the URL.
- Use 'vol. X, no. Y' before the year; pages prefixed with 'pp.'.
Worked example
MLA 9 · journal articleA real journal article formatted using the MLA 9 rules above.
Gleick, Peter H., et al "Climate change and the integrity of science." *Science*, vol. 328, no. 5979, 2010, pp. 689-690. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.328.5979.689.
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Citation fields
MLA 9 journal article citation guide
Two containers: the journal and the database
The journal article is where MLA 9's container model really earns its keep, because a scholarly article usually sits inside two containers at once: the journal that published it and the database where you found it. MLA 9 lets you nest them. The first container is the journal, with its title, volume, issue, date, and page range; the second container is the database, such as JSTOR or Project MUSE, with its own location URL or DOI. Recognising that you are describing two nested containers, not one flat reference, is the conceptual key to citing academic articles in MLA.
The article title is in quotation marks and the journal title is italicised, following the small-work-in-quotes, large-work-in-italics rule. After the journal name come the numbers, written out with labels: vol. 328, no. 5979. This is a clear contrast with APA, which uses 328(5979) with no words. MLA's labelled style is more verbose but harder to misread, and the labels are required, not optional.
Dates, pages, and DOIs in MLA form
The publication date for a journal comes after the volume and issue. For most scholarly journals this is just the year, but for journals that publish by season or month, give that too, as Spring 2020 or Aug. 2020. The page range follows, prefixed with pp. for multiple pages or p. for a single page: pp. 689-90. MLA abbreviates the second number in a range when it is in the same hundred, so 689-690 becomes 689-90, a small convention markers do notice.
MLA 9 prefers a DOI when one exists, formatted with the doi: prefix rather than APA's full URL: doi:10.1126/science.328.5979.689. If there is no DOI, give the stable URL of the article, dropping the http protocol if your instructor prefers. When the article came through a database, that database is the second container and its DOI or URL is its location element, placed at the very end of the entry after the database name in italics.
In-text citation and the no-page online case
In text, MLA journal articles use the author-page form: (Gleick 689). When three or more authors are involved, use et al.: (Gleick et al. 689). The page you cite is the specific page where the quoted or paraphrased material appears, not the article's full range. If you have named the authors in a signal phrase, the parenthetical contains only the page number.
Some online-first or HTML-only articles have no page numbers at all. In that case MLA tells you to cite by author alone and to avoid inventing page or paragraph numbers — give just (Gleick). If the source numbers its own paragraphs explicitly, you may cite them with the abbreviation par. or pars. Use the generator below to assemble the journal and database containers in order, then verify the labelled vol. and no. fields and the pp. page range, since those labels are the most common thing MLA tools omit.