This video will provide some guidelines
on citing books --
including edited books, ebooks, chapters, and plays -- using MLA style.
Watch the other MLA style videos for citing different source types.
When citing a book you need to find the following information:
the name of the author, title of the book, publisher and date of publication.
Let's look at a basic book example.
The needed information can be found on either the book's
copyright page or the record in a library catalog.
Here's a book called Shakespeare: A very short introduction by author
Germaine Greer, publishing company Sterling, and date of publication 2010.
Now that we have all the information we need, we put it in the right places to
create our citation. Author is written as Lastname, Firstname.
The title is in italics, the publisher, and the year. One thing to note is the
capitalization in MLA: you capitalize every significant word and words after
punctuation, just not articles like a, an,
and the, and not the prepositions.
Next, let's look at some slightly more complex book examples.
Here are the front pages for an edited book with two editors,
called "For all time?" You would include the subtitle too,
even if it's written in a different or smaller font.
Let's imagine we are citing the entire book.
It would look just like the simple book example, including both editor names.
Join the two names with an "and" and use the word editor or editors after their names.
Notice, however, that throughout the rest of the citation,
you only do Lastname, Firstname on the first author or editor name.
Everyone else's name after the first is Firstname Lastname.
Then the title, publisher, and year are the same as before.
At this point it's helpful to explore MLA's concept of "containers"
to help understand their way of citation.
A standalone book contains the text of the entire book.
It could also be held or accessed within a bigger container such as an
online website or an e-book database. Let's say we access this as an
e-book through the library database called Ebook Central.
For citing an e-book, the first part of our citation stays exactly the same.
We just add a little bit on the end to indicate the container:
the name of the database in italics and the stable URL.
Notice that we have to edit the URL a little bit from how it appears on
the web: MLA says to take off the http:// part at the beginning of most URLs.
Also notice the punctuation rules in MLA:
in general, MLA always has a period after the author,
a period after the title, and a period to separate the containers.
But then you use commas to separate the elements within the containers
that are dealing with a single unit, such as publisher, year or database name, URL.
Finally, for an edited book like this, it's actually much more common
that people don't really want to cite the whole book but instead
they only use one chapter from the book. You would only cite
the entire edited book, as in my previous example, if there are not
separate chapter authors, but in this case each chapter has a unique author.
So you would only need to cite the chapter, or essay, poem, play, or whatever section you're using.
This requires a little more revision.
Now the book chapter is the actual work we're citing; the book title is container #1;
and the e-book database, assuming we read it online, is container #2.
So for our citation we start with the chapter author
since his chapter is the only part of the book we're using.
Then the chapter, essay, or poem title is in quotation marks.
For container number one, the regular book title stays in italics,
but the editors' names move to after the book title,
and notice that their names are Firstname Lastname, not reversed.
The publisher and year info stays the same, we just add the page numbers
of the chapter with pp. to indicate it's multiple pages after the year.
Then for container #2, the e-book access info, it's just the same as in the other eBook.
You may be wondering when to use italics and when to use quotation marks in titles
in MLA style. The good news is the rule is consistent across all types of sources.
If it's a title of something published within a larger work, use quotations marks.
If it's a standalone title, use italics.
So for example, you see the book chapter title we just used here.
We'll look later at articles and websites.
It even applies to songs from a CD or an episode from a TV show.
You apply the same rule no matter what type of source it is.
This page contains some other useful sources and good examples
you might want to check out if you get stuck as you're creating your citations.
Don't hesitate to contact the library with any questions about citation!
