Guide for Documenting Your Sources

Here is an excellent resources for the proper MLA format for citing and documenting your sources. This page is for the electronic sources. You will see many more guides in the menus to the left.

This guide shows you how to include in-text citations (parenthetical citations) and the works cited page.

If you do not find what you are looking for, this site also indicates many correct citations for web sources and this one is also a good source.

Here is one excerpt from OWL about documenting online sources within the body of your text, called in-text citation:

Citing Non-Print or Sources from the Internet

With more and more scholarly work being posted on the Internet, you may have to cite research you have completed in virtual environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL's Evaluating Sources of Information resource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source in your Works Cited.

Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers, but often, these sorts of entries do not require any sort of parenthetical citation at all. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:

* Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
* You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
* Unless you must list the website name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com or Forbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.