MLA 9th edition
How to cite a book in MLA 9th edition
Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
THE FORMAT
A book in MLA, at a glance
Author Last, First. Title of the Book: Subtitle. Edition, Publisher, Year.
Halloran, Jean. The Quiet Architecture of Scientific Prose. 2nd ed., Ridgeline Academic Press, 2019.
(Halloran 87)
In prose: Halloran traces the modern lab report to three postwar editorial decisions (87).
Halloran, Jean, and Peter Nkemelu. The Quiet Architecture of Scientific Prose. 2nd ed., Ridgeline Academic Press, 2019.
In text: (Halloran and Nkemelu 87)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the works cited builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What MLA needs from a book
Elements to collect
- Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author)
- Year of publication of the edition you actually read
- Full title, including any subtitle after the colon
- Edition number, when it is not the first
- Publisher name
- DOI or URL for an ebook that has one
Rules specific to this entry
- MLA shortens publisher names: drop Inc., Co., Ltd. and Publishers, and abbreviate a university press to UP — Fenmore UP, U of Chicago P.
- The edition comes before the publisher and uses the handbook’s abbreviations: 2nd ed., rev. ed., expanded ed. Skip it for a first edition.
- There is no place of publication in MLA 9. The one exception the handbook allows is a book published before 1900, where the city can matter more than the publisher.
- A translator or editor goes in the other-contributors slot after the title, spelled out in lowercase: translated by Anna Weiss.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element MLA needs for a book: Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author); Year of publication of the edition you actually read; Full title, including any subtitle after the colon; Edition number, when it is not the first.
Build the works cited entry
Arrange those details in the MLA order: Author Last, First. Title of the Book: Subtitle. Edition, Publisher, Year.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Halloran 87) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Halloran traces the modern lab report to three postwar editorial decisions (87)..
Check it against the exceptions
MLA shortens publisher names: drop Inc., Co., Ltd. and Publishers, and abbreviate a university press to UP — Fenmore UP, U of Chicago P.
MLA RULES
The conventions behind every MLA entry
MLA Handbook (9th ed.) is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the works cited is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the works cited is sorted, and where MLA entries most often go wrong — are collected on the MLA 9th edition guide.
The same book in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about MLA and books
What if the book has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a book?
Author or authors (or an editor, when there is no single author), Year of publication of the edition you actually read, Full title, including any subtitle after the colon, and the rest of the elements listed above. Books look simple until you hit an edition number, a translator, or a publisher that has been bought three times — and the title page rarely matches the cover.
Is there anything unusual about a book in MLA?
MLA shortens publisher names: drop Inc., Co., Ltd. and Publishers, and abbreviate a university press to UP — Fenmore UP, U of Chicago P.
What else catches people out here?
The edition comes before the publisher and uses the handbook’s abbreviations: 2nd ed., rev. ed., expanded ed. Skip it for a first edition.
Can I reformat this book in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole works cited at once.
