Citing sources: MLA vs APA side by side, the annotated bibliography, and avoiding plagiarism

MLA and APA are the two citation styles most school and first-year courses ask for. MLA (9th edition) is used in English and the humanities and cites by author and page; APA (7th edition) is used in psychology, the sciences and education and cites by author and year. Both want the same three things, a short in-text pointer, a full entry at the end, and a hanging indent, and they differ mainly in punctuation and order. Below, one book, one article and one web page are formatted both ways, then the annotated bibliography, then where plagiarism begins. Citing is Step 6 of the whole essay in order.

MLA or APA: which one, and why there are two

MLA is the style of the Modern Language Association, and it grew up around the close reading of texts. Its in-text citation gives the page, because in an English essay the reader wants to find the line. APA is the style of the American Psychological Association, and it grew up around research in a field where the date of a finding matters; its in-text citation gives the year, so a reader can see at once whether a study is recent.

That is why English, languages and the humanities ask for MLA, and psychology, the sciences, education and nursing ask for APA. The rules this page states are those of the MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021), and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (2020). Two rules sit above both: the assignment decides which style you use, and your instructor's word beats the manual. If the course handout shows an entry one way, do it that way.

In the Academic Writing course this page is idea 21, citation (MLA and APA) and avoiding plagiarism, between integrating sources: quotation, paraphrase and summary and the rhetorical analysis essay; the annotated bibliography is idea 23. The step before all of it is idea 19, finding and evaluating sources: no citation can repair a source that should not have been used.

The three entries, side by side

Three invented sources, each formatted both ways. The book, the article, the clinic and its web page do not exist; the addresses use the reserved .example domain and the DOI carries the placeholder prefix 10.0000, so nothing here can be copied into a real bibliography by mistake. A DOI is a digital object identifier, the permanent address of an article.

A book.

MLA: Nakamura, Priya. The Quiet Shelf: Reading in a Loud Century. Harbourline Press, 2021.

APA: Nakamura, P. (2021). The quiet shelf: Reading in a loud century. Harbourline Press.

The differences: MLA gives the full first name, APA the initial. MLA keeps the title in headline capitals; APA uses sentence case, capitalising only the first word, the first word after the colon and proper nouns. Neither style gives the city of publication any more: MLA dropped it in its 8th edition and APA 7 dropped the publisher location too.

A journal article.

MLA: Okafor, Daniel, and Lena Marsh. "Retrieval Practice in the Grade 12 Classroom." Journal of Secondary Pedagogy, vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 113–30. https://doi.org/10.0000/jsp.2020.0113.

APA: Okafor, D., & Marsh, L. (2020). Retrieval practice in the Grade 12 classroom. Journal of Secondary Pedagogy, 14(2), 113–130. https://doi.org/10.0000/jsp.2020.0113

The differences: MLA puts the article title in quotation marks and writes "vol." and "no."; APA writes neither word and italicises the volume number but not the issue. MLA shortens the second page number when the first digits repeat (113–30); APA gives the full range. MLA ends the entry with a period after the DOI; APA ends with the DOI as a bare link and no period, so that the address stays clickable. Only MLA writes "and" between the authors; APA uses the ampersand.

A web page by an organisation.

MLA: "Teen Sleep and School Start Times." Lakeshore Sleep Clinic, 14 Mar. 2024, www.lakeshoresleep.example/teen-start-times.

APA: Lakeshore Sleep Clinic. (2024, March 14). Teen sleep and school start times. https://www.lakeshoresleep.example/teen-start-times

The differences: when the organisation that wrote the page also publishes the site, MLA leaves the author slot empty and begins with the page title, naming the organisation once as the site; APA keeps the organisation as the author and leaves out the site name instead. MLA writes the date day, month, year, abbreviating any month longer than four letters; APA writes the year, then the month and day, in brackets after the author. MLA 9 lets you leave off the "https://" unless you need the address to work as a link, so follow your course's example; APA keeps the full address. The APA page title is in italics because a web page stands alone, like a book.

In-text citations, side by side

The same three sources, pointed to from inside a sentence.

The source	MLA	APA
The book, page 42	(Nakamura 42)	(Nakamura, 2021, p. 42)
The article, page 118	(Okafor and Marsh 118)	(Okafor & Marsh, 2020, p. 118)
The web page	("Teen Sleep")	(Lakeshore Sleep Clinic, 2024)

MLA cites the web page by a shortened title because the entry begins with the title; APA cites the organisation because the entry begins with it. Then the rules students trip on, one line each:

• Three or more authors. MLA names the first author and writes et al. ("and others") in both the entry and the text. APA 7 writes et al. in the text from the very first citation and lists up to twenty authors in the reference entry.
• Page numbers. A quotation needs one in both styles. For a paraphrase, MLA gives the page whenever the source has pages; APA does not require one, though it welcomes a page or paragraph number when the source is long and the reader would otherwise hunt.
• An author named in the sentence drops out of the brackets. MLA: Nakamura argues that quiet reading is a skill ... (42). APA: Nakamura (2021) argues ... (p. 42).
• Two sources by the same author. MLA adds a shortened title to the brackets to tell them apart: (Nakamura, Quiet Shelf 42). APA tells them apart by the year, and when the year repeats, by a letter: (Nakamura, 2021a).
• The ampersand. APA uses & inside brackets and and in the sentence. MLA uses and everywhere.

The page itself

In MLA the list is headed Works Cited; in APA, References. In both, the heading is centred, the entries run alphabetically by their first word (the author's surname, or the title when there is none), every entry carries a hanging indent (the first line at the margin, the rest indented), and the page is double spaced. MLA puts no title page on a school essay: your name, the instructor, the course and the date sit at the top left of the first page, with your surname and the page number at the top right of every page. APA 7 has a student title page: the title in bold, your name, the school, the course, the instructor and the due date, centred in the top half, with the page number at the top right and no running head. A professional APA paper adds the running head; a student paper does not.

Integrating a source before you cite it

The course's idea 20 comes before the citation: how the source enters your sentence. A quotation is the source's exact words, inside quotation marks, with the page. A paraphrase is the source's idea in your words and your sentence shape, still cited. A summary is shorter than the source and still cited. The citation is not optional for any of the three.

Here is a sentence from our invented Okafor and Marsh article: Students who answered a question before rereading the chapter retained twice as much a week later as students who reread first.

Paraphrased well: Okafor and Marsh (2020) found that a week on, the students who had tested themselves before rereading remembered about twice what the rereaders did (p. 118). New shape, same idea, cited.

Paraphrased badly: Students who answered a question prior to rereading the chapter kept twice as much seven days later as students who reread initially (Okafor and Marsh 118). The same sentence with synonyms swapped. That is patchwriting, and most courses treat it as plagiarism even with the citation attached. Where the paraphrase sits in the paragraph, as evidence between a topic sentence and the sentence that says what it shows, is where the evidence sits in a paragraph.

The annotated bibliography: what it is and one entry worked

An annotated bibliography is a reference list in which each entry is followed by a short paragraph. It is the research paper's plan, usually due before the paper, and it is the course's idea 23. The annotation has three jobs: summarise the source's argument and evidence, evaluate its reliability and any bias, and say how you will use it. The usual length is 100 to 150 words, or whatever the assignment says.

Our worked entry, in APA, with the three jobs marked in bold where they begin:

Okafor, D., & Marsh, L. (2020). Retrieval practice in the Grade 12 classroom. Journal of Secondary Pedagogy, 14(2), 113–130. https://doi.org/10.0000/jsp.2020.0113

Summary. Okafor and Marsh compare two Grade 12 chemistry classes over one unit: one answered a short question before each rereading, the other reread first. A week later the question-first class remembered about twice as much. Evaluation. The study is small, two classes in one school, and the authors say so; its strength is that the test was the same for both groups and marked blind. It cannot show whether the gain lasts past a week, which is the claim my essay most needs. Use. I will use it as the strongest evidence for my second reason, that self-testing beats rereading, and pair it with a larger study for the long-term claim.

Two sentences of summary, two of evaluation, one of use: 109 words, inside the usual range. The mistakes a marker sees: an annotation that is only summary; an abstract copied in as the annotation, which is plagiarism even here; and an annotation that never says what the source does for the essay. The last fault usually means the thesis is not yet settled; the annotation serves the thesis the annotation serves, and if you cannot say how, the problem is upstream.

Where plagiarism begins

What counts: copying words without quotation marks; a paraphrase that keeps the source's sentence shape with the words swapped (Howard 1995 called this patchwriting and argued it is usually a learning stage, not theft, which is also why courses still refuse it in final work); an idea or a statistic without a citation; handing in your own earlier essay again without permission; and text a chatbot wrote handed in as yours where the course forbids it. Where that last line sits differs by course and by assignment; where the line is on using AI for an essay lays it out course by course.

What does not count: common knowledge (the boiling point of water, the year a war ended), your own analysis, and a paraphrase that is genuinely rewritten and cited.

The honest paragraph. Most plagiarism in school is not theft. It is notes taken three weeks ago with no page numbers, a quotation copied into the notes without its marks, and a deadline. The sentence goes into the essay as the student's own because the notes no longer say otherwise. The prevention is a note-taking habit, not fear.

How to avoid it: the note-taking habit

1. Every note carries the source and the page. Not "Okafor" but "Okafor & Marsh 2020, p. 118".
2. Quotations go in quotation marks in your notes, not only in the essay. If the words are the author's, the marks go on the moment you write them down.
3. Paraphrase from memory with the source closed, then open it and check you have kept the idea and lost the shape.
4. Keep a running reference list from the first source. The entry takes a minute now and twenty at midnight.
5. When in doubt, cite. No marker has ever lowered a grade for a citation that was not strictly needed.

A plagiarism checker, as a category, matches strings of text against what it has seen; it catches copied sentences and misses an uncited idea or a rewritten paraphrase, so passing one is not the same as having cited honestly. What essay checkers catch and miss goes further. Notes that carry the page number are chapter 6 of the free playbook.

The two styles on one screen

	MLA	APA
The list is called	Works Cited	References
Who uses it	English, languages, the humanities	Psychology, the sciences, education, nursing
In-text form	(Author page)	(Author, year, p. page)
Author's name	Surname, full first name	Surname, initials
Capitals in titles	Headline case	Sentence case for article and book titles; headline case for journal names
Where the date goes	Near the end of the entry	Right after the author, in brackets

One more place the two styles meet: the references section of a lab report, which the sciences usually ask for in APA, is the lab report's references section.