MLA Citation Style: In-Text Citations, Works Cited and Where Footnotes Fit

MLA documents a source in two places at once: a short parenthetical citation in the sentence where you use the source, and a full entry on the Works Cited page at the end. Footnotes are not part of that mechanism. If someone told you to "use footnotes in MLA", they meant one of two things. Either the course actually wants Chicago, or they meant MLA's optional notes, which carry commentary alongside the parenthetical citation rather than replacing it. Working out which one applies takes a minute and saves you rebuilding a reference list the night before submission.

The two parts MLA asks for

The in-text citation is minimal by design. You give the author's surname and a page number, with no comma between them, no "p." and no year.

Before (APA habits carried into an MLA paper):

Web citations decay faster than authors expect (Sellitto, 2005, p. 16).

After (MLA 9):

Web citations decay faster than authors expect (Sellitto 16).

If the surname already appears in your sentence, the parenthesis holds only the page:

Sellitto found that authors first began recording the date on which they accessed a web resource in 2000, and did so inconsistently (16).

When the source has no printed pages, such as a web page or an unpaginated online journal, you give the surname alone: (Coble). Do not substitute a PDF viewer's counter or a paragraph number for a printed page. Every surname in a parenthesis has to match the first element of exactly one Works Cited entry. That match is what makes the paper navigable, because the reader sees (Sellitto 16), scans the alphabetical list and lands on one entry.

Where footnotes actually fit

MLA does allow notes, in a narrow role. The MLA Style Center describes two kinds: content notes, which carry comment or explanation the sentence itself cannot hold, and bibliographic notes, used when you need to point at several sources at once or evaluate the sources you are using. Either can be set as footnotes at the bottom of the page or as endnotes before the Works Cited list, marked with a superscript arabic numeral placed after the punctuation.

What a note does not do in MLA is carry the citation. That is the split from Chicago's notes-bibliography system, where the note is the citation. MacEwan University Library's guide to that style describes the mechanism plainly: you place a superscript number at the end of the quotation or paraphrase, and the corresponding note at the foot of the page holds the source information. In MLA the source information lives in the parenthesis and in the Works Cited entry, and the note holds the aside.

Before (a Chicago habit in an MLA paper):

Reference rot affects a substantial share of the humanities literature.¹

¹ Z. Coble and Jojo Karlin, "Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature," Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2023.

After (MLA):

Reference rot affects a substantial share of the humanities literature (Coble and Karlin).¹

¹ The figure covers only links in Works Cited sections; the study excluded notes and in-text links from its sample.

The second version puts the source where a reader of an MLA paper looks for it and keeps the note for something the sentence genuinely could not accommodate.

Building a Works Cited entry

MLA 9 assembles every entry from one template of nine core elements, always in this order:

1. Author.
2. Title of source.
3. Title of container,
4. Other contributors,
5. Version,
6. Number,
7. Publisher,
8. Publication date,
9. Location.

You fill in the elements your source has and skip the ones it does not. The punctuation belongs to the template rather than to your judgement. A period follows the author and the title of the source, commas separate the container elements, and a period closes the entry.

A journal article assembled that way:

Subramanian, P., et al. "Building Credibility with Comprehensive Citation Practices." The Indian Journal of Radiology & Imaging, 2025, pp. 97–101, https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0044-1796641.

The container here is the journal. Volume and issue numbers, where the journal uses them, sit in the Number slot before the date, written as vol. [number], no. [number],. The Location slot takes the page range for a print article and the DOI or URL for something read online.

URLs, DOIs and the access-date question

That Location slot is where a Works Cited page ages badly, and the evidence on this is not subtle. Sellitto examined 1,068 web-located citations across 123 conference papers and found that 46% could not be accessed, with HTTP 404 responses the single largest cause; the missing citations amounted to 22% of all citations in the sample (2). Klein and colleagues, working across a much larger corpus of science, technology and medicine articles, concluded that for a large majority of articles referencing resources on the open web, the context those references pointed at can no longer be revisited at all (26).

The humanities are not spared, which matters because MLA is a humanities style. Coble and Karlin analysed works-cited links in Digital Humanities Quarterly and found that 31% of citations containing links no longer resolved correctly, that 80% of articles carried at least one reference with a URL, and that articles averaged 8.5 links each.

Three consequences for your own Works Cited page:

• Prefer a DOI to a raw URL. A DOI resolves through a registry rather than a server's directory structure, so it survives a site redesign. Write it as https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy.
• Use a stable permalink when there is no DOI. A journal's article landing page, a repository record or a library catalogue entry will outlive the address bar of a search result.
• Add an access date when the page can change under you, or when it carries no publication date. MLA treats the access date as optional supplemental information, but for an undated web page it is the only date your entry has.

Klein and colleagues go further and argue that web archives capture referenced pages only incidentally, through routine crawling rather than in response to anyone citing them, so authors should archive the resources they intend to reference before submitting (28). Saving a snapshot takes seconds and gives your reader something to open when the original moves.

What actually costs marks

Two failure modes matter here, and formatting is only one of them.

The first is ordinary bibliographic error. Subramanian and colleagues note that incorrect author names, titles and publication details are among the most common problems found in reference lists, and that such errors undermine the credibility of the work; they report citation-related problems as a contributing reason in 10 to 15% of manuscript rejections (99, 100). A supervisor reading your thesis does a smaller version of what an editor does, which is to pick two or three entries and check them.

The second failure mode is newer. Reference managers are excellent at formatting and were never designed to verify. Jin and colleagues, comparing reference management software with recent AI-based tools, observe that EndNote ships more than 7,000 citation styles, while its "Find Full Text" feature retrieves the full text of a reference you already hold without confirming that the underlying metadata correspond to a real publication (3, 5). Those systems were built to organise, store and format references, not to establish that the references exist.

A Works Cited entry can therefore be flawless MLA and still point at nothing. Keep the two jobs separate in your own workflow: use a bibliography generator or a citation generator for the punctuation and the element order, then confirm that each entry resolves to a real record before you hand the paper in. The academic sources behind this article came out of cytado's own corpus, which is why every page number quoted above is a printed one.

Related reading: choosing between MLA, APA and Chicago and where to get the page number for a citation from a PDF or ebook.