Undergraduate classes at CCS use MLA citation style. This page provides information and resources for formatting your citations using MLA. Please refer to the MLA Quick Reference Guide for examples using this style.
OWL: MLA Citations - The Online Writing Lab (OWL) from Purdue has instructions for formatting citations. OWL provides guidance on citing all types of resources, including books, websites, and artworks, among others.
zbib - This site generates basic citations for you - just enter the URL of your source. You will need to check the result against the MLA Handbook or OWL, however, as these citations are not always formatted correctly.
Citing sources for visual works is just as important as it is in a written context. You should not only record the creators of works you have consulted for inspiration, but also document the evolution of your own ideas. For help citing images in your work, see MLA Works Cited: Other Common Sources from Purdue OWL.
Example:
"Common knowledge" is information that does not need to be cited because it would be known by the average reader (i.e. Barack Obama was the first African American president of the US). If you are not sure if your information qualifies as common knowledge, verify with your professor who your audience is. For more information, see the MIT Handbook.
You must cite your sources - both within the text of your paper and in a "works cited" page - whenever you include information that is not common knowledge. For in-text citations in the MLA style, you typically only need the author's last name and page number (if it comes from a book or an article) inside parenthesis at the end of the sentence. Your works cited page (or bibliography) is where you provide more in-depth information about each of your sources.
Remember to always cite any artificial intelligence (AI) tools you use. You should include the prompt you used, the name of the AI tool and its iteration, the company that made the tool, the date you used it, and the tool's URL.
These elements should be used for all such citations, regardless of whether the AI's output is text or images. See the MLA Style Center for more information.
Example:
“Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.