Citation Making Options

Option #1:

Noodletools is a free, online, comprehensive, and user-friendly program you can use to generate a citation for your document. It will ask you a series of questions. You will input all necessary information and then copy and paste the citation provided.

After you select MLA choose the appropriate source from the dropdown box:

Noodletools will continue to ask you questions to narrow the type of source. You may have a journal entry, but did you find it online or in print? Was it in a database or online? Once you have narrowed the source, it will ask you to provide information from the document itself:

The boxes on the left are for you to input information, but along the right side they provide tips for making sure you know how to locate the necessary information and how to input the information. Make sure that you read these directions carefully the first few times you make your citations.

When you finish filling out the form, click Generate Citation. Noodletools will provide you with an MLA style citation:

You need to copy and paste the citation into your paper. DO NOT LEAVE THIS PAGE WITHOUT COPYING AND PASTING THE CITATION. Once you leave, you cannot get back to this and you will have to start the citation over. Once you paste the citation into your word document you will need to reformat it:

1. Highlight the entire citation.
2. Change the font to Times New Roman, size 12
3. Use a hanging indent: This means the first line is set at the one-inch margin, and every subsequent line is indented once using your TAB key. If the TAB key is causing the whole citation to shift, hit Enter and then hit TAB.

Option #2:

Ebscohost is one of the largest academic databases available. It provides articles from magazines, newspapers, journals and more. If you use Ebsco host to find your research, the database will provide you with an MLA citation. The key is to know where to look for it. Begin by finding your article in the database. Let’s use the example below:

To read the article you can clink the links on the bottom “HTML Full Text” or “PDF Full Text,” but to make the citation, click on the title “Once there was a Mountain.” This will take you to a resources page which lists all of the information about the article’s publication and will provide you with an abstract, a paragraph describing the content of the article:

At the top of this page is a tool bar. In the top right is a yellow piece of paper that says “Citation” next to it, but THIS IS A LIE. That is not a button and will not provide you with a citation of any kind. On the other side, the button fourth from the right is a little golden piece of paper that says ‘Cite’ on it. THIS is your button:

When you click it, a new window will pop open with all of your citations:

The MLA citation is the second from the bottom. Copy and paste it into your word document and reformat it.

1. Highlight the entire citation.
2. Change the font to Times New Roman, size 12
3. Use a hanging indent: This means the first line is set at the one-inch margin, and every subsequent line is indented once using your TAB key. If the TAB key is causing the whole citation to shift, hit Enter and then hit TAB.

Be aware that occasionally EBSCO will give you a citation where certain words are entirely in caps. You will need to fix this.

Option #3:

If you prefer to make your citations by hand, be aware that MLA is a guide more than anything else. There is more than one correct way to cite most sources. For a by-hand how-to-guide, there’s one linked on the library’s website: here.