MLA Dissertation Writing Tutorial: How To Cite Your Sources


When graduate students are faced with getting their PhDs, they are also faced with another hurdle, their dissertation. This long paper has many different parts that have to be formatted and organized just right leaving a lot of students left confused and lost. One such thing is the bibliography. This is the page where you list all of your sources, and the first question is how are they to be cited, well APA style is for science degrees while MLA is for humanities. Below is a writing tutorial to MLA style citations.

MLA citation tutorial


The most common source used is print, whether in a book or an essay online. There are many different things you can source and here is a way to source them.

  1. A book with one author’s citation would be
    • Last name, First name. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  2. A book with two or more authors is similar.
    • Last name, First name and Last name, First name. (no matter how many authors there are you do it in alphabetical order) Title of book. City of publication: Publisher, Year of publication, Medium of publication.
  3. If you are using two books by the same author, it will be the same basic citation as the first example but you would list the books in alphabetical order.
    • (A) Last name, First name. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
    • (B) Last name, First name. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  4. A book with no author you normally cite but without the author’s information and organize in the alphabetical list based on the title of the book.
    • Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  5. If the book you used was originally in another language, then you need to show who did it in the citation. Example:
    • Last name, First name. Title of Book. Trans. First name last name City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  6. Sometimes authors go back in, and books are revised creating a new edition. If your book is an edition, then you just add it in after the title.
    • Last name, First name. Title of Book. Edition number. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  7. If you use a source from a multivolume resource, such as encyclopedias and other such things, you have to add in the volume after the book title or editor/translator if there is one.
    • Last name, First name. Title of Book. (Editor/translator would go here) Volume number. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
  8. If you decided to use a dissertation as a source, you would have to see if it is published or not. There are differences on how it is formatted based on such.
    • Published dissertation- Last name, First name. Title of Book and Thesis. University awarding degree and year of award. Publication date. Medium of publication
    • Unpublished- Last name, First name. “Title of Book and Thesis.” University awarding degree and year of award. Medium of publication

    Along with books and print sources, there are electronic sources like websites that can be cited like this:

  9. Editor, author, or compiler name (if available). Name of Site. Version number. Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available). Medium of publication. Date of access. (and if you wish the URL here)

When creating your citation page for your dissertation, it is important to know how to cite many different kinds of sources, so there are no mistakes on whether you have cited it correctly or not.