Creating In-Text Citations (MLA Format)

Montgomery College Library
Writing, Reading, & Language Center
Takoma Park/Silver Spring 

Welcome! This is a brief introduction to citing your sources in the MLA format, which is usually used for writing, literature, social science, and history classes. 

My name is Jenny Hatleberg, and I’m a librarian at the Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus. This presentation will focus on creating in-text citations.

The world is filled with information, in many forms. When you write your paper, you will be exploring different sources of information. You will learn things you didn’t know, and you will find that things were said in ways that you cannot improve. 

When you use others’ information in a research paper, telling your reader where it came from shows them that you are not taking someone else’s work as your own, and shares resources with them, helping them add to their own knowledge.

Telling someone exactly where to find a fact can take a lot of explaining. You don’t have to do it like this, where you write out every piece of information. 

Instead, you will use a short reference in the paragraph where the source is used– called an in-text citation– and a longer reference in your Works Cited list at the end of your paper. For more information about the Works Cited list, visit the MLA Citations guide. 

The in-text citation is the place where you briefly introduce the reader to your source. In the MLA format, you will include the author’s name, the title (if there is no author), and the page number (if it is available). Let’s look at some examples.

This is a summary, in my own words, of information found in a book called Foundations and Best Practices in Early Childhood Education. Even when you put the information into your own words, you still need to say where it came from. In the MLA format, include the author’s name and the page number. You can put this information at the end of the summarized section, as here, or you can put it at the beginning of the summarized section. You will include the full citation, as shown here, in your Works Cited list.

This example is a direct quote from an article found in a database. There are no page numbers, so we just use the authors’ names. It is important to pay attention to the punctuation. Notice the quotation marks around the direct quote, and the period at the end of the sentence, after the parentheses. 

These two examples show how to cite something with no author and no page numbers. If this is the case for you, just use the first word or words of the title in your in-text citation. This is the same source quoted in two different ways. You can give the source at the end of the sentence, as in the first example, or when you introduce the quotation in the paragraph, using your own words to lead into it.

For more details on creating in-text citations, go to the MLA citations guide.

If you need help finding articles for your paper, visit the Montgomery College Library website. For help writing your paper, visit one of the campus Writing Centers.