IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Modern Language Association updated their guidelines on April 1, 2016. We have not yet updated this section of Resources for Researchers to reflect these changes. We have ordered a copy of the new guidelines and will update as soon as possible.
Parts of a Citation:
Publisher
Books
The name of a book's publisher can often be found on the cover of the book, the title page, or the copyright page. However, for books, simply having the name of the publisher is not sufficient. You also need the city in which the publisher is located. And if the city is not well know, you also need the state. For example, the publisher for Robert Harris' Using Sources Effectively is Pyrczak Publishing located in Glendale, California.
Periodicals
The publisher of an article found in a periodical is the journal, magazine, or newspaper in which the article appeared. For example, the publisher of Robb Walsh's "The Bread of the Dead" is Natural History. Page numbers show the "place of publication" for articles.
Internet Sites
It often takes some investigative work and critical thinking to identify the publisher of a web site. Unfortunately, few web sites list the publisher on each page. For example, no publisher was listed on "Native Legends" when I first viewed this page.1 The web page is located at
Often, it is possible to locate the publisher of a web site by truncating the URL by eliminating any text that comes after the last slash. For example, for "Native Legends," you would eliminate the following text from the URL:
- /legends.html?tqskip1=1&tqtime=1209"
This will give you a new URL of:
Here you would have learned that "Native Legends" was created for the Thinkquest '98 Scholarship Competition.(You also learn that the date of publication is 1996; something not included on the original web site.) But is the scholarship competition the publisher? Truncate the URL again to come up with
You are now at the Think Quest Home page and you could rightly assume that Think Quest is the publisher of "Native Legends."
1The publisher is now listed on the website. However, I decided to continue to use this example to make the point that is important for students to print out copies of any page they plan to cite in their research. In case one of your references in removed or changed, you will be able to provide the printout to your professor if she/he wants you to verify your source.
