Discovering Ideas

List of Works Cited Entries for Internet Sources

Here is a brief description of how to list some Internet sources in your list of works cited using MLA format.  For more examples, see Hult and Huckin 13a or the Palomar Library page on MLA Citations.  If you cite a page on the World Wide Web in your essay, you need to have an entry for it in your list of works cited. The format is basically the same as for print sources, with a couple of necessary adjustments.

World Wide Web Sites

Provide the following information in your list of works cited entry:

• The author's name (if known)
• the full title of the portion of the work you are citing, in quotation marks
• the title of the complete work, if applicable, in italics
• the document date, if known and if different from the date accessed
• the date you accessed the page
• the full http address

Note that date of the document is not always required--sometimes a document will not give you the date it was created or revised. But the date on which you accessed the document is always required. This is because Internet documents change; therefore, it may be important to know when you saw the version of the document you are using.

The following is an example of a citation of an Internet source:

Mills, Henry P. "Walker Percy: Artist, Philosopher, Scientist." The Walker Percy Project. 1997. 9 Sept. 2000 <http://sunsite.unc.edu/wpercy/introduction.html>. 

Notice that in a printed paper the citation would be double spaced and the second line would be indented five spaces.

If no author is listed for the page, you would omit the author.  If it is a single page, without subdivisions, you would just list the main page in italics without giving a subsidiary page in quotation marks.

When citing the work in your essay, you will always use the first element in the list of works cited entry.  For example, for the work listed above, a correct citation would be (Mills).

Periodical from an On-line Data Base

If you are using a periodical article from one of the on-line databases available through the library, such as InfoTrac or Ebscohost, you will need to note that fact in the list of works cited entry.  While you would list the beginning and ending pages of the article if you used a hard copy, for an article you accessed from a periodical data base you will just give the beginning page number, followed by the plus sign: +.  After the page number you will list the name of the data base, the institution through which you accessed the data base, the date you accessed the article, and the url for the data base.  Notice this is not the url for the article itself, which won't work for someone else trying to access the article over the Internet.  It is the url that will get someone to the opening page of the data base.

Here is an example:

Hansen, Edmund J., and James A. Stephens.  "The Ethics of Learner-centered Education."  Change Sept./Oct. 2000: 40+.  Academic Search Elite, Ebsco Host.  Palomar College Library.  9 Nov. 2000.  <http://daphne.palomar.edu/library/>.

This page was last edited: 08/28/03