|
Home
> Articles
>
MLA Formatting and Style Guide >
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11 [Previous |
Next]
 MLA
Formatting and Style Guide - Works Cited: Electronic Sources
by
Dave Neyhart and Erin E. Karper. Revision by Karl Stolley
www.owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/
01.
MLA - General Format
02.
MLA - In-Text Citations: The Basics
03.
MLA - In-Text Citations: Author-Page Style
04.
MLA - Formatting Quotations
05.
MLA - Footnotes and Endnotes
06.
MLA - Works Cited Page: Basic Format
07.
MLA - Works Cited Page: Books
08.
MLA - Works Cited: Periodicals
09.
MLA - Works Cited: Electronic Sources
10.
MLA - Works Cited: Other Non-Print Sources
11.
MLA - Additional Resources
Works Cited: Electronic Sources
The MLA Style
Manual provides some examples of electronic source citations in
chapter six; however, the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers covers a wider variety of electronic sources in chapter six.
If your particular source is not covered here, use the basic forms
to determine the correct format, consult the MLA Handbook, talk to
your instructor for help.
Some Tips on Handling Electronic Sources
It is always a good idea to maintain personal copies of electronic
information, when possible. It is good practice to print or save Web
pages or, better, using a program like Adobe Acrobat, to keep your
own copies for future reference. Most Web browsers will include
URL/electronic address information when you print, which makes later
reference easy. Also learn to use the Bookmark function in your Web
browser.
Special Warning for Researchers Writing/Publishing Electronically
MLA style requires electronic addresses to be listed between carets
(<, >). This is a dangerous practice for anyone writing or
publishing electronically, as carets are also used to set off HTML,
XHTML, XML and other markup language tags (e.g., HTML's paragraph
tag, <p>). When writing in electronic formats, be sure to properly
encode your carets.
Basic Style for Citations of Electronic Sources
Here are some common features you should try and find before citing
electronic sources in MLA style. Always include as much information
as is available/applicable:
-
Author and/or editor names
-
Name of the database, or title of project, book, article
-
Any version numbers available
-
Date of version, revision, or posting
-
Publisher information
-
Date you accessed the material
-
Electronic address, printed between carets (<, >).
Web Sources
Web sites (in MLA style, the "W" in Web is capitalized, and "Web
site" or "Web sites" are written as two words) and Web pages are
arguably the most commonly cited form of electronic resource today.
Below are a variety of Web sites and pages you might need to cite.
An Entire Web Site
Basic format:
Name of Site. Date of Posting/Revision. Name of
institution/organization affiliated with the site
(sometimes found
in copyright statements). Date you
accessed the site <electronic
address>.
It is necessary to list your date of access because web postings are
often updated, and information available on one date may no longer
be available later. Be sure to include the complete address for the
site. Here are some examples:
The Purdue OWL Family of Sites. 26 Aug. 2005. The
Writing Lab and
OWL at Purdue and Purdue University.
23 April 2006 <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/>.
Felluga, Dino. Guide to Literary and Critical Theory. 28
Nov. 2003.
Purdue University. 10 May 2006
<http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/>.
Treat entire Weblogs or "blogs" just as you would a Web site. For
single-author blogs, include the author name (or screen name or
alias, as a last resort); blogs with many authors, or an anonymous
author, should be listed by the title of the blog itself:
Design Observer. 25 Apr. 2006. 10 May 2006.
<http://www.designobserver.com/>.
Ratliff, Clancy. CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism. 7
May 2006. 11
May 2006. <http://culturecat.net>.
Long URLs
URLs that won't fit on one line of your Works Cited list should be
broken at slashes, when possible.
Some Web sites have unusually long URLs that would be virtually
impossible to retype; others use frames, so the URL appears the same
for each page. To address this problem, either refer to a site's
search URL, or provide the path to the resource from an entry page
with an easier URL. Begin the path with the word Path followed by a
colon, followed by the name of each link, separated by a semicolon.
For example, the Amazon.com URL for customer privacy and security
information is <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
tg/browse/-/551434/104-0801289-6225502>, so we'd need to simplify
the citation:
Amazon.com. "Privacy and Security." 22 May 2006
<http://www.amazon.com/>.
Path: Help; Privacy &
Security.
A Page on a Web Site
For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if
known, followed by the information covered above for entire Web
sites. Make sure the URL points to the exact page you are referring
to, or the entry or home page for a collection of pages you're
referring to:
"Caret." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 28 April
2006. 10 May
2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caret>.
"How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow.com. 10 May 2006
<http://www.ehow.com/
how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html>.
Stolley, Karl. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The OWL
at Purdue.
10 May 2006. Purdue University Writing
Lab. 12 May 2006
<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/>.
An Image, Including a Painting, Sculpture, or Photograph
For works housed outside of an online home, include the artist's
name, the year the work was created, and the institution (e.g., a
gallery or museum) that houses it (if applicable), follwed by the
city where it is located. Include the complete information for the
site where you found the image, including the date of access. In
this first example, the image was found on the Web site belonging to
the work's home museum:
Goya, Francisco. The Family of Charles IV. 1800. Museo
del Prado,
Madrid. 22 May 2006
<http://museoprado.mcu.es/i64a.html>.
In this next example, the owner of the online site for the image is
different than the image's home museum:
Klee, Paul. Twittering Machine. 1922. Museum of Modern
Art, New
York. The Artchive. "Klee: Twittering
Machine." 22 May 2006 <http://artchive.com/artchive/K/
klee/twittering_machine.jpg.html>.
For other images, cite as you would any other Web page, but make
sure you're crediting the original creator of the image. Here's an
example from Webshots.com, an online photo-sharing site ("brandychloe"
is a username):
brandychloe. Great Horned Owl Family. 22 May 2006
<http://image46.webshots.com/
47/7/17/41/347171741bgVWdN_fs.jpg>.
The above example links directly to the image; but we could also
provide the user's profile URL, and give the path for reaching the
image, e.g.
brandychloe. Great Horned Owl Family. 22 May 2006
<http://community.webshots.com/user/brandychloe>.
Path: Albums; birds; great horned owl family.
Doing so helps others verify information about the images creator,
where as linking directly to an image file, like a JPEG (.jpg) may
make verification difficult or impossible.
An Article in a Web Magazine
Author(s). "Title of Article." Title of Online
Publication. Date of
Publication. Date of Access
<electronic address>.
For example:
Bernstein, Mark. "10 Tips on Writing The Living Web." A
List Apart:
For People Who Make Websites. No. 149
(16 Aug. 2002). 4 May 2006
<http://alistapart.com/articles/writeliving>.
An Article in an Online Scholarly Journal
Online scholarly journals are treated different from online
magazines. First, you must include volume and issue information,
when available. Also, some electronic journals and magazines provide
paragraph or page numbers; again, include them if available.
Wheelis, Mark. "Investigating Disease Outbreaks Under a
Protocol to
the Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention." Emerging Infectious
Diseases 6.6
(2000): 33 pars. 8 May 2006 <http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol6no6/wheelis.htm>.
An Article from an Electronic Subscription Service
When citing material accessed via an electronic subscription service
(e.g., a database or online collection your library subscribes to),
cite the relevant publication information
as you would for a
periodical (author, article title, periodical title, and volume,
date, and page number information) followed by the name of the
database or subscription collection, the name of the library through
which you accessed the content, including the library's city and
state, plus date of access. If a URL is available for the home page
of the service, include it. Do not include a URL to the article
itself, because it is not openly accessible. For example:
Grabe, Mark. "Voluntary Use of Online Lecture Notes:
Correlates of
Note Use and Note Use as an
Alternative to Class Attendance."
Computers and
Education 44 (2005): 409-21. ScienceDirect. Purdue U
Lib., West Lafayette, IN. 28 May 2006
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/>.
E-mail or Other Personal Communication
Author. "Title of the message (if any)." E-mail to
person's name.
Date of the message.
This same format may be used for personal interviews or personal
letters. These do not have titles, and the description should be
appropriate. Instead of "Email to John Smith," you would have
"Personal interview."
E-mail to You
Kunka, Andrew. "Re: Modernist Literature." E-mail to the
author. 15
Nov. 2000.
MLA style capitalizes the E in E-mail, and separates E and mail with
a hyphen.
E-mail Communication Between Two Parties, Not Including the Author
Neyhart, David. "Re: Online Tutoring." E-mail to Joe
Barbato. 1 Dec.
2000.
A Listserv or E-mail Discussion List Posting
Author. "Title of Posting." Online posting. Date when material
was
posted (for example: 18 Mar. 1998).
Name of listserv. Date of access
<electronic address
for retrieval>.
If the listserv does not have an open archive, or an archive that is
open to subscribers only (e.g., a password-protected list archive),
give the URL for the membership or subscription page of the
listserv.
<http://www.interversity.org/lists/techrhet/subscribe.html>
Discussion Board/Forum Posting
If an author name is not available, use the username for the post.
cleaner416. "Add <b></b> Tags to Selected Text in a
Textarea" Online
posting. 8 Dec. 2004. Javascript
Development. 3 Mar. 2006
<http://forums.devshed.com/javascript-development-115/
add-b-b-tags-to-selected-text-in-a-textarea-209193.html>.
An Article or Publication in Print and Electronic Form
If you're citing an article or a publication that was originally
issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database
that your library subscribes to, you should provide enough
information so that the reader can locate the article either in its
original print form or retrieve it from the online database (if they
have access).
Provide the following information in your citation:
-
Author's name (if not available, use the article title as the
first part of the citation)
-
Article Title
-
Periodical Name
-
Publication Date
-
Page Number/Range
-
Database Name
-
Service Name
-
Name of the library where or through which the service was
accessed
-
Name of the town/city where service was accessed
-
Date of Access
-
URL of the service (but not the whole URL for the article, since
those are usually very long and won't be easily re-used by someone
trying to retrieve the information)
The generic citation form would look like this:
Author. "Title of Article." Periodical Name Volume
Number (if
necessary) Publication Date: page
number-page number. Database name.
Service name.
Library Name, City, State. Date of access
<electronic
address of the database>.
Here's an example:
Smith, Martin. "World Domination for Dummies." Journal
of Despotry
Feb. 2000: 66-72. Expanded Academic
ASAP. Gale Group Databases.
Purdue University
Libraries, West Lafayette, IN. 19 February 2003
<http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com>.
Article in a Database on CD-ROM
"World War II." Encarta. CD-ROM. Seattle: Microsoft,
1999.
Article From a Periodically Published CD-ROM
Reed, William. "Whites and the Entertainment Industry."
Tennessee
Tribune 25 Dec. 1996: 28. Ethnic
NewsWatch. CD-ROM. Data
Technologies, Feb. 1997.
|
