How to Cite a Book in MLA

The MLA book format

The template for a Works Cited entry is:

Author. Title of the Book. Edition, Publisher, Year.

• Author: surname first for the first author; a second author follows in normal order after “and”. Three or more authors: first author plus et al.
• Title: title case and italic, including the subtitle after the colon.
• Edition: a numbered edition is part of the entry — 6th ed. — placed before the publisher. Skip it for a first edition.
• Publisher: give the publisher’s name, shortening “University Press” to UP (Harvard UP, Oxford UP) and dropping business words such as Company or Inc.
• Editor: for an edited collection, the editor sits in the author position followed by “editor” (or “editors”).

Worked examples

Three authors — first author plus et al.
Brown, Peter C., et al. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard UP, 2014.

A later edition, two authors
Creswell, John W., and J. David Creswell. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. 6th ed., SAGE, 2023.

One author
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

In-text citations

Author plus page, no comma and no “p.”: (Kahneman 89). Two authors: (Creswell and Creswell 112). Three or more: (Brown et al. 45).

Common mistakes

• Adding the publisher’s city — MLA dropped publication places decades ago.
• Writing “University Press” in full instead of UP.
• Naming an edition for a first-edition book, or hiding a 6th edition because the title page emphasises the title.
• Citing a chapter under the book’s entry alone — a chapter gets its own entry, with the chapter title in quotation marks and the book as its container.

Check your reference against your institution’s guidelines — lecturers sometimes vary the style.