Welcome to the internet. We hope you like it. There are some strange things out there, so be careful. But there are also many excellent factual websites. The kind you might want to cite in an essay, say.
To make sure you do this correctly, however, you may want to read our guide to citing a website in MLA referencing first. Read on below to find out more.
In-Text Citations
Most MLA citations use the author’s surname and a page number. But the internet does not have pages. As a result, you only need to give the author’s surname when citing a website:
It has been described as a ‘freakish one-off’ single (Lewis).
Should you cite two authors with the same surname, add a first initial to clarify who you are citing.
No Named Author
Not every web page will include a named author. In such cases, you can use the page title instead. If we were citing a website with no named author, for instance, we would write:
The single spent 22 weeks in the charts (‘Tubthumping’).
Here, ‘Tubthumping’ is the name of the web page. However, make sure to check carefully before you use a page title in a citation. The author will usually be named somewhere, even if it is hard to spot.
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Works Cited
Finally, you should give full source information in the Works Cited list at the end of your document. For a website in MLA referencing, you should use the following format in particular:
Surname, First name. ‘Page name’. Publishing website/organisation, date published, URL. Date accessed (if applicable).
The date of access is not compulsory in the most recent edition of the MLA Handbook. However, it can be useful to include one if you think the content of the site may change.
In practice, then, the entry for a website would look like this:
Lewis, Adam. ‘The Secret Anarchist Punk History of Chumbawamba’s Hit Song “Tubthumping”’. Junkee, 10 Aug. 2017, junkee.com/secret-anarchist-punk-historychumbawamba-tupthumping/117358. Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.
If the web page does not have a named author, as with citations, use the title instead. Furthermore, if a page does not have a date of publication, simply skip this piece of information (you can still include a date of access):
‘Tubthumping’. OfficialCharts, www.officialcharts.com/search/singles/tubthumping. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.