MLA citation checker

MLA Citation Checker

Paste an MLA 9 Works Cited list. Each entry is checked against Crossref. The in-text citation is a different line, and it is not what this page reads.

Journal submission
Thesis
Lab draft

Try a sample below

Verified

Nature, 2013

Thermometry in a living cell

Mismatch

Science

1999

Nature

2013

Not found

10.1234/not-a-real-doi

Check this list

The file stays in this browser.

Paste APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, or a numbered list — or drop your .bib file.

Or drop a .bib, .ris, or .txt file

30 free. A paid report continues, up to 1,000.

The report will appear here

Pick a sample, or paste a list.

Sample input

Kucsko, Georg, et al. "Nanometre-Scale Thermometry in a Living Cell." Nature, vol. 500, no. 7460, 2013, pp. 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373.

Walters, William H., and Esther Isabelle Wilder. "Fabrication and Errors in the Bibliographic Citations Generated by ChatGPT." Scientific Reports, vol. 13, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5.

Vaswani, Ashish, et al. "Attention Is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 30, 2017, pp. 5998-6008.

A list in another style belongs on the citation checker.

Frequently asked questions

Should I paste the in-text citation or the Works Cited entry?

The Works Cited entry. The in-text citation is only a name and a page, which is not enough to resolve.

Does et al. belong in MLA Works Cited?

Yes, when there are three or more authors. Name the first, then et al. Two authors are both named.

Where do I check a list that is not MLA?

On the citation checker. That page takes the list in the style you already wrote.

Works Cited is not the in-text citation

MLA 9 keeps two traces of the same work. The in-text citation is short, usually the family name and a page, in parentheses at the end of the sentence. The Works Cited entry is the full record, alphabetized at the end of the paper. This page checks the full record. Pasting only “(Kucsko 56)” gives the page nothing to look up.

The Works Cited line carries the authors, the title of the source in quotation marks when it is a part of a larger whole, the container, the year, and the location. Those are the pieces set beside the Crossref record. The in-text page number is not one of them. A wrong page in the sentence will not show up here. A wrong year in the Works Cited entry will.

Alphabetizing is your job. The checker returns rows in the order you pasted, so you can walk the list from the top. It does not sort them, and it does not complain that “Walters” was placed before “Kucsko.”

The container, and what it is allowed to be

MLA 9 describes a source as nested in a container. The article is the source. The journal is the container. A chapter is the source. The book is the container. An episode is the source. The series is the container. The Works Cited entry names the source first, then the container in italics.

Crossref stores the container as the journal, the book, or the proceedings. The check compares that name with the container you wrote. It does not compare the title of the source with the container. Mixing them is a common slip: the journal name written where the article title belongs, or the article title repeated as if it were the journal. The row shows both sides.

A second container is allowed in MLA. A journal article read in a database can name the journal and then the database. The check uses the first container, the one that is the publication, and ignores the database name. JSTOR is not the journal. Naming it does not make the lookup fail, and it does not count as the venue.

How n.d. and n.p. are read

MLA 9 uses n.d. when no date can be found, and n.p. when no publisher or no page can be found. Older editions used n.p. for both a missing publisher and missing pages. In the ninth edition, a missing page is simply omitted, and n. pag. is no longer the instruction. If a line still says n.p., read it as a gap the writer could not fill, not as a number.

The checker does not treat n.d. as a year. There is nothing to compare with the issued year, so the year row stays blank. A blank is not a match. If Crossref has a year and your line says n.d., look at the record and decide whether a date was available after all. The page will not replace n.d. with that year.

n.p. is not sent as a venue and not sent as a page. A line that has a title and an author can still be searched. A line that has only n.d. and n.p. cannot. Give it a title.

How a page range is written

MLA 9 introduces a page range with pp. and a single page with p. The range uses a hyphen. Hundreds that stay the same are not compressed in the way some house styles compress them: 54-58 stays 54-58, and 112-15 is not required. The location can also be a DOI or a URL when there are no pages, which is normal for an online article.

The Crossref record may hold a page range, and it may not. This check does not fail a row because pp. 54-58 differs in punctuation from 54–58. Pages are not one of the fields that decide verified or mismatch. The fields that do are the title, the first family name, the year, the DOI when you printed one, and the container.

If the only location you have is a URL, keep it. Do not invent a page range to make the entry look like a print article. A DOI is the more stable location. When both are present, the DOI is what the lookup uses.

Three MLA 9 lines, as you would paste them

The three lines in the sample are Works Cited entries, not in-text citations. The first has more than two authors, so MLA 9 names the first and writes et al. That et al. is correct in the Works Cited entry. It is the opposite of APA, which saves et al. for the sentence. The checker still takes the first family name.

The second names two authors, in full, joined by and. Both names are in the entry. Et al. would be wrong there. The third has a page range and no DOI. The title, the year, and the container are enough for a search. The result shows the record that came back so you can reject a neighbor.

Paste your own Works Cited list in the same shape. One entry per line or per paragraph. Quotation marks around the article title are expected. The container follows them.

A list that is not MLA

APA puts the year in parentheses after the authors and prints every name up to 20. Chicago has its own notes and its own bibliography. A .bib file is neither. Those lists belong on the citation checker, which is the general page. This page is only the Works Cited shape.

Nothing here rewrites an entry into MLA, and nothing here inserts a container you left out. If the container is missing, the venue row is blank. You add the container yourself after you have seen the record.

The list stays in the browser. A DOI is sent as a DOI. A line without one is sent as a short search on the title, the first author, and the year. The paper around the list is not uploaded.