Sample Citations
Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford UP, 2011.
Ortiz, David. Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Translated by Martin Dunlap, West Virginia UP, 2015.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Large print edition. Knopf, 2004.
Walker, Brian. Westerns of TV's Golden Age. Vol. 4, Hudson UP, 2006.
Wright, Alyssa. "Container Gardening for the Novice." The Big Book of Plants, edited by Linda Blake, West Virginia UP, 2014, pp. 3-15.
Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford UP, 2011. ACLS Humanities E-book, hdl.handle.net/2012/heb.088453.0004004.
Wright, Alyssa. "Container Gardening for the Novice." The Big Book of Plants, edited by Linda Blake, West Virginia UP, 2014, pp. 3-15, HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/09093843-284-4.
An author is "the person or group primarily responsible for producing the work" (MLA Citation Style Guide 22). An author can be a person, persons, or an organization who created the work that you are citing.
For books:
If you are citing a chapter in a book with an editor and chapters written by different authors, the next element in your citation is the title of the chapter. Make sure that you use standardized capitalization, that is, capitalize most of the words in the title. Don't worry about articles (The, A, An) or prepositions (in, on, of, . . . ).
Format chapter titles appropriately with quotation marks. Remember, a chapter title is placed in quotation marks; a book title is placed in italics.
In MLA Citation Style, a container is considered to be "a larger whole . . . that holds a source" (30). It is a larger source that contains smaller works.
If you are citing from an entire book, its title is the next element in the citation.
If you are citing a book or a chapter of a book found in a database or on a website, however, make sure that you also cite where you found the chapter / book. See the Two Containers example above.
The "Other Contributor" field is where you put people who helped contribute to the source, but not the author or authors. This field for is for editors, translators, illustrators, performers, and the like. See the MLA Citation Guide page 37 for other examples.
If the source you are citing exists in multiple versions, include the version that you are using in this field.
For books, this would be the edition.
Sources may be part of a numbered series, like issues of journals, graphic novels, or episodes of TV shows.
For books, this would be a volume in a multi-volume set.
To find a book's publisher, check the title or copyright page.
When citing a source with more than one publication date, cite the date that is "most relevant to your use of the source" (42).
For books, check the title page or copyright page for date of publication.
Location is defined by the type of source you are citing.
If you are citing a chapter in book, use the page numbers for that chapter.
If you are citing an ebook, use the permanent URL for this field. See the Two Containers examples above.
