Pick a source type, fill in the author, title, publisher, year and URL, press Generate Citation, and you get an MLA 9 shaped entry you can paste into your works cited page. Books, web pages and journal articles are the three options in the dropdown.
It is for the moment the night before hand-in when you have eleven sources open and no intention of typing all of them by hand, and for checking that the entry you already wrote is in the right order.
One honest detail: the tool insists on author and title and refuses to do anything without them, and the author box behaves specifically. Type Smith, John with a comma and it keeps the last name first. Type John Smith with no comma and it hands the name back exactly as you wrote it, which means the citation starts with your first name.
Generate MLA 9 citations from source information. Supports books, websites, and journal articles.
What comes out
All three formats start the same way: author, a full stop, the title in italics, a full stop. Then the source type decides the rest.
- Book: Author. Title. Publisher, Year.
- Website: Author. Title. Site Name, Year. URL.
- Journal: Author. Title. Journal Name, Year. URL.
Leave the publisher blank and that segment simply disappears rather than printing an empty gap. Leave the URL blank on a web source and the citation ends after the year. Everything is built as one string and shown in a highlighted box, ready to select and copy.
Three entries, filled in
A book: author Smith, John, title The Great Gatsby, publisher Scribner, year 2020. Out comes Smith, John. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 2020. That is correct MLA 9 order, and it is the format the tool is strongest on.
A web page: author Doe, Jane, title How to Write an Essay, website name Writing Tips, year 2023, URL https://example.com/essay. Out comes Doe, Jane. How to Write an Essay. Writing Tips, 2023. https://example.com/essay. The real MLA 9 form would put the page title in quotation marks and the date as 15 Jan. 2023 with the day and month, so read this as a good skeleton rather than a finished entry.
A journal article: author Smith, John, title Sleep and Memory in First-Year Students, journal Journal of Learning Research, year 2021, and a DOI or article URL. Out comes the author, the italic article title, then the italic journal name, the year and the link. MLA 9 would also want the volume, the issue and the page range between the journal name and the year, and those three fields do not exist here.
Where it stops short
The gaps are worth listing so nothing surprises you. Every title comes back italicised, including web page titles, which MLA sets in quotation marks with italics reserved for containers such as the site name, the journal or the book. There is no day and month for online sources, no volume, issue or page range for journals, no access date, no DOI field, and no handling for two or more authors, where the input gets cut at the second name. Anything with a second author, a translator or an editor needs a look from you.
It also gives you one entry and nothing else. There is no in-text citation, no export to a reference manager, no scanning of a DOI, and no check against a database, because the tool only ever sees what you typed into six boxes. The result page tells you it is MLA 9, and it is a starting point rather than a guarantee.
Before anything goes in, put the finished entry next to a real reference. The MLA Handbook itself is the authority, and the Purdue OWL pages walk through the same formats with the container logic spelled out. Your instructor’s own preferences beat both of them, so if the assignment sheet asks for DOIs, or for a different treatment of online sources, that instruction wins.
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Frequently asked questions
What is MLA 9?
The ninth edition of the Modern Language Association handbook, used mostly in humanities courses for formatting papers and building a works cited page. It is built around the idea of containers, where a page sits inside a site, an article inside a journal, and each container adds its own details.
Do I have to include the URL?
MLA 9 encourages including a URL for anything you found online, though some instructors prefer a DOI where one exists, and some prefer the link shortened. Follow whatever the assignment sheet says first, then MLA’s general guidance.
Why is my author’s last name not first?
Because the box did not contain a comma. Enter it as Smith, John and the order is kept as MLA wants it. Enter it as John Smith and it passes through untouched, which puts the given name first in the finished citation.
Can it do in-text citations?
No. It builds works cited entries only. In-text references are short by design, author and page number, and you write those as you go rather than generating them at the end.
Can I rely on it without checking?
Not quite. It gets the order right and it gets books close to right, and it misses details on web pages and journal articles. Run the output past a real MLA example before you hand anything in, because a citation that is 90% right looks exactly like one that is wrong.