General Guidelines for Bibliographies (MLA/APA) Chart

General Guidelines for the Bibliography

MLA

APA

Begin on new page

Yes

Yes

Begin with the centered title

Works Cited

References

Include an entry for every intext citation. Include author, title, and publication data for each entry, if available. Use a period to set off each of these elements from the others and leave one space after the periods. Do NOT number the entries.

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Do not

Do not

Put entries in alphabetical order by the author’s or editor’s last name. If the author is unknown, use the first word of the title excluding the articles a, an, or the.

Entries are listed alphabetically by the author's last name (or, for entire edited collections, editor names). Author names are written last name first; middle names or middle initials follow the first name.

Give the last name and initials for all authors of a particular work for up to and including seven authors. If the work has more than seven authors, list the first six authors and then use ellipses ( . . . ) after the sixth author's name. After the ellipses, list the last author's name of the work.

Do not list titles (Dr., Sir, Saint, etc.) or degrees (PhD, MA, DDS, etc.) with names. A book listing an author named "John Bigbrain, PhD" appears simply as "Bigbrain, John"; do, however, include suffixes like "Jr." or "II." Putting it all together, a work by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be cited as "King, Martin Luther, Jr.," with the suffix following the first or middle name and a comma. Alphabetize works with no known author by their title; use a shortened version of the title in the parenthetical citations in your paper.

Underline or italicize titles of books and periodicals.

Use italics (instead of underlining) for titles of larger works (books, magazines) and quotation marks for titles of shorter works (poems, articles)

Italicize titles of longer works such as books and journals. Do not italicize, underline, or put quotes around the titles of shorter works such as journal articles or essays in edited collections.

Capitalize the first and last and all important words in all titles and subtitles. Do not capitalize articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, and the to in infinitives.

Capitalize each word in the titles of articles, books, etc, but do not capitalize articles (the, an), prepositions, or conjunctions unless one is the first word of the title or subtitle: Gone with the Wind, The Art of War, There Is Nothing Left to Lose.

When referring to any work that is NOT a journal, such as a book, article, or Web page, capitalize only the first letter of the first word of a title and subtitle, the first word after a colon or a dash in the title, and proper nouns. Do not capitalize the first letter of the second word in a hyphenated compound word. Capitalize all major words in journal titles.

In the publication data, provide place published, publisher’s names and date.

Abbreviate publisher’s names and months Dec rather than December Oxford UP instead of Oxford University Press

Do not abbreviate: day, week, month, year

Do not use p., pp., or page(s). Numbers alone will do. When page spans over 100 have the same first digit, use only the last two digits of the second number: 243-47 Use a hanging indent. Start the first line of each entry at the left margin and indent all subsequent lines of the entry five spaces. Double-space within entries and between them. For every entry, you must determine the Medium of Publication. Most entries will likely be listed as Print or Web sources, but other possibilities may include Film, CD-ROM, or DVD. URL or not?

List page numbers of sources efficiently, when needed. If you refer to a journal article that appeared on pages 225 through 250, list the page numbers on your Works Cited page as 225-50.

Yes

Yes

Double space all citations, but do not skip spaces between entries.

Double space all citations, but do not skip spaces between entries.

Writers are no longer required to provide URLs for Web entries. However, if your instructor or publisher insists on them, include them in angle brackets after the entry and end with a period. For long URLs, break lines only at slashes. If you're citing an article or a publication that was originally issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database, you should type the online database name in italics. You do not need to provide subscription information in addition to the database name.

Online scholarly journal articles without a DOI (Digital Objective Identifier) require the URL of the journal or database home page, depending on where you located the article.

Use the following guides to check your work:

Purdue Online Writing Lab: APA Formatting and Style Guide http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ Purdue Online Writing Lab: MLA Formatting and Style Guide http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

When referencing a print article obtained from an online database, provide appropriate print citation information (formatted just like a "normal" print citation would be for that type of work). By providing this information, you allow people to retrieve the print version if they do not have access to the database from which you retrieved the article. For articles that are easily located, do not provide database information. If the article is difficult to locate, then provide database information.