Quick Help: Citing digital sources (MLA)

Quick Help: Citing digital sources

Citing digital sources

When citing sources accessed online or from a digital database, give as many of the following elements as you can find:

  1. Author. Give the author’s name, if available.
  2. Title. Put titles of articles or short works in quotation marks. Italicize book titles.
FOR WORKS FROM DATABASES: FOR WORKS FROM THE WEB:
3. Title of periodical, italicized. 3. Title of the site, italicized.
4. Publication information. After the volume/issue/year or date, include page numbers (or n. pag. if no page numbers are listed). 4. Name of the site’s publisher or sponsor. This information usually appears at the bottom of the page.
5. Name of database, italicized, if you used a subscription service such as Academic Search Premier. 5. Date of online publication or most recent update. This information often appears at the bottom of the page. If no date is given, use n.d.
6. Medium of publication. Use Web for works from both databases and the Web.
7. Date of access. Give the most recent date you accessed the source.

If you think your readers will have difficulty finding the source without a URL, put it after the period following the date of access, inside angle brackets, with a period after the closing bracket.