How to Cite an Article from a Magazine in MLA

INSTRUCTOR: How to cite an article from a magazine in MLA style.

Say you’re working on an evaluation paper for your health sciences course, and you find a great article in Scientific American about the inner-workings of the brain.

How do you find all the information you need to cite the article in your paper? First let’s look at the six elements that make up a works cited item in MLA style.

To cite a magazine article, you’ll need to include 5 elements: the name of the author of the article; the title of the article; the name of the magazine; the date the magazine was published; and the pages the article appears on.

The first piece of information in the citation will be the author’s name, which you can find on the first page of the article, usually near the article’s title. Write the author’s last name first, followed by their first name and middle initial, if they have one.

If there is more than one author, list additional authors in the order they appear on the article. List these subsequent authors first name followed by last name.

Include the article’s title after the author’s name. Be sure to write the title exactly as it appears in the magazine. To make sure the title you include in your works cited entry is accurate, copy the title as it is written on the page where article begins and copy. Make sure the title appears in quotation marks.

You can always find the title of the magazine on the cover. When you write the magazine’s title in your citation, make sure the text is italicized.

The date is usually near the magazine’s title, and may also be located on the magazine’s spine. Magazines are usually weekly, monthly, or quarterly publications. For a weekly publication, include the day, followed by the month, and then the year in which it was published. When writing the month in an MLA works cited entry, abbreviate it to the first 3 letters, unless it is September, in which case you abbreviate the month to 4 letters.

Next, include the page numbers the article appears on. You can determine this by simply turning to the final page of the article. In this case the article begins on page 44 and ends on page 49. Indicate this by including the first and last page the article appears on, separated by a hyphen. Following the page range, include a period.

Sometimes magazine articles do not appear on consecutive pages. When page numbers are not consecutive, simply include the page the article begins on, followed by a plus sign.

Once you’ve completed the works cited entry, be sure to double-check your punctuation. There should be a period following the author’s name; the article title should be in quotation marks and be followed by a period that appears inside the quotation marks; the magazine’s name should be in italics and followed by a comma; the month of publication should be abbreviated, with a comma following the publication date; and there should be a period after the article’s page range.

Also, if your works cited entry is longer than one line, make sure you indent each line except for the very first one. This is called a hanging indent.

And that’s how you cite an article from a magazine in MLA style.