GUIDELINES FOR IN-TEXT CITATIONS

MLA documentation requires in-text citations that refer to a list of works cited—an alphabetized list of all the sources you’ve drawn from. Sometimes all the necessary information for an in-text citation fits in the body of your sentence:

On page 162 of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, authors John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay suggest that downtown Detroit was doomed as soon as automobiles made the railroads less popular.

But more often you’ll include some key information in parentheses just before the period. In this second example, the writer included the book title and authors’ names in her sentence and, thus, only needed to provide the page number in parentheses.

In Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay suggest that downtown Detroit was doomed as soon as automobiles made the railroads less popular (162).

In this third example, there is no source information embedded in the sentence itself, so the in-text citation includes both the authors’ names and the page number. Note that the title isn’t included. With the authors’ names, the reader has enough information to find the relevant entry in the list of works cited.

Although the growth of car manufacturing brought jobs to Detroit, America’s drivable network of industrial cities and residential suburbs “bled entire cities dry: starting with Detroit” (Kasarda and Lindsay 180).