In MLA style, all the sources you cite parenthetically throughout the text of your paper are listed together in full in the Works Cited section, which comes after the main text of your paper.

When citing an essay, you include information in two places: in the body of your paper and in the Works Cited that comes after it. The Works Cited is just a bibliography: you list all the sources you used to write the paper. The citation information you include in the body of the paper itself is called the “in-text citation.”

Formatting the Works Cited Section

• Page numbers: Just like the rest of your paper, the top of the page should retain the right-justified header with your last name and the page number. Don’t number your Works Cited page “1,” which often happens if you create it as a separate document then forget to merge it with your essay.
• Title: On the first line, the title of the page—“Works Cited”—should appear centered, and not italicized or bolded.
• Spacing: Like the rest of your paper, this page should be double-spaced and have 1-inch margins. Don’t skip an extra line after the title or between citations, and remember to deselect “add space after paragraph” if Word defaults to that setting.
• Alphabetical order: Starting on the next line after the page title, your references should be listed in alphabetical order by author. Multiple sources by the same author should be alphabetized by their titles within the same group. After the first full listing of the author’s name, the following entries have three hyphens in place of the name rather than writing it out in full each time.
• Hanging indents: Each reference should be formatted with what is called a hanging indent. This means that the first line of each reference should be flush with the left margin (i.e., not indented), but the rest of that reference should be indented 0.5 inches further. It’s basically the reverse of a normal paragraph, where the first line is indented and the rest are left-justified. Here, every line after the first is indented. A startling number of students fail to master hanging indention, but any word-processing program will let you format this automatically so you don’t even have to do it by hand. In Microsoft Word, for example, you simply highlight your citations, click on the small arrow right next to the word “Paragraph” on the home tab, and in the popup box choose “hanging indent” under the “Special” section. Click “OK,” and you’re done.

Take a look at the example below, match your own Works Cited page to it, and, again, resist the urge to add your own special formatting flourishes. Remember, too, that this page follows the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, which came out in April 2016. If you have a tried and trusted model from middle- or high school days before 2016, you might need to update it now. One quick way to check the difference is to look at how page numbers within a cited document are formatted. In older editions of the MLA Handbook, pages were not signaled by the abbreviation “pp.” (see the Coontz entry below for an example of this new abbreviation in action).

A correctly formatted Works Cited page, according to the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook.