How to Cite Multiple Authors in MLA: Two, Three or More (Et Al.)

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Published July 4, 2026

Your source has more than one author, and every MLA question arrives at once: does the Works Cited entry list every name, does the second author’s name get flipped around like the first, at what point does “et al.” take over, and is there a comma in front of it? MLA 9 settles all of this with a single threshold and a few punctuation rules — but the rules sit close enough to APA’s that habits imported from another class are the main way this goes wrong.

The shortest answer: two authors, name both — “Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich” in the Works Cited, (Dorris and Erdrich 23) in-text. Three or more authors, use the first author plus et al. in both places — “Burdick, Anne, et al.” and (Burdick et al. 42). No comma before et al. in the parenthetical, and no italics in citations or Works Cited entries.

Multiple authors in the Works Cited list

Two authors. Invert only the first author’s name. The second author stays in normal First Last order, connected by a comma plus “and”:

Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. The Crown of Columbus. HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

The comma before “and” looks odd to some writers, but it is deliberate. As the MLA Style Center puts it, “A comma is needed in addition to and so that the reader can easily distinguish the two names” — without it, “Dorris, Michael and Louise Erdrich” could be momentarily misread as one inverted name for a single person — “Michael and Louise Erdrich Dorris.”

Three or more authors. Give the first-listed author, inverted, followed by a comma and “et al.” — and stop there:

Burdick, Anne, et al. Digital_Humanities. MIT P, 2012.

Both examples above are the MLA Style Center’s own. Note what the second one means: MLA abbreviates in the Works Cited list itself, not just in-text. Whether the work has three authors or thirty, the entry names only the first. MLA 7 required every name for exactly three authors and made et al. optional only above three; the MLA 8 and 9 standard is first author plus et al. from three up, full stop.

The same author-element rules apply to every source type — a book, a journal article, a website. And they extend to contributors in other slots: a collection with four editors is “edited by Anne Burdick et al.” with no comma, because the editor’s name in that position is not inverted.

One boundary worth marking: a source with an organization as author, or with no author at all, is a different situation with its own rules — see MLA citation with no author for those.

MLA in-text citation with multiple authors

Two authors: give both surnames joined by “and,” then the page number — no comma, no ampersand:

(Dorris and Erdrich 23)

In a narrative citation, the names move into your sentence and only the page stays in parentheses: Dorris and Erdrich argue that the expedition reads differently from the deck than from the shore (23).

Three or more authors: the first author’s surname plus et al., then the page:

(Burdick et al. 42)

There is no comma inside that parenthetical — not after the surname, not before the page number. The in-text citation mirrors the opening of the Works Cited entry, minus the inversion that made the entry’s comma necessary.

In running prose, skip et al. entirely. The MLA Style Center’s guidance for narrative citations of multi-author works is to “spell out the authors’ names or, if you are referring to a work by several authors, state the name of the first-listed author, followed by ‘and others’”; et al. is “reserved for the list of works cited and parenthetical citations.” So the sentence reads “Burdick and others describe the digital humanities as inherently collaborative (42)” — not “Burdick et al. describe…”

When to use et al. in MLA

The threshold is simple: three or more authors, from the first citation onward, in both the Works Cited list and in-text citations. The mechanics of the abbreviation itself are where papers lose marks:

• Spelling. Et al. is Latin for “and others” (short for et alii and its variant forms et aliae and et alia). “Et” is a complete word and takes no period; “al.” is the abbreviation and always takes one. “Et al” and “et. al” are both wrong.
• Type. Never italicize it. The MLA Style Center states that “in parenthetical citations and works-cited-list entries, the abbreviation should be set roman.”
• The comma. A comma comes before et al. only when the name in front of it is reversed. In “Burdick, Anne, et al.,” the Style Center explains, “The comma tells your reader that the name Anne is out of normal position and that the abbreviation attaches to the full name, not just to Anne.” When the name is not inverted — including names customarily written surname-first, as many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names are — there is no comma: “Liu Chang et al.” That is exactly why in-text citations never take one: (Burdick et al. 42), not (Burdick, et al. 42).

Same first author, different coauthors

Suppose your paper uses two articles both led by Taylor, each with a different team behind her. Two rules interact here:

In the Works Cited list, repeat the full “Taylor, First, et al.” form for each entry. Do not substitute three hyphens (---) for the name in the second entry — that shorthand is reserved for consecutive entries with identical authorship, and “Taylor et al.” with different coauthors is not the same author team twice. (For genuinely repeated authors, see multiple works by the same author in MLA.)

In-text, disambiguate with short titles, since “(Taylor et al. 12)” could point to either entry:

(Taylor et al., “Collaboration”) and (Taylor et al., “Cowriting”)

This is the one place a comma legitimately follows et al. inside a parenthetical — and it belongs to the author–title boundary, not to the abbreviation.

MLA vs APA for multiple authors

Most multiple-author errors in MLA papers are APA habits wearing an MLA costume. The two systems disagree at every step:

The deepest difference is in the reference list. APA never abbreviates at three authors there — its rule is to name every author up to 20, with an ampersand before the last; only at 21 or more does it give the first 19, an ellipsis, and the final author’s name, and et al. never appears in an APA reference entry at all. MLA collapses to “First Author, et al.” in the Works Cited itself the moment a source hits three authors.

In-text, APA joins two authors with an ampersand in parentheses and spells out “and” only in narrative sentences, while MLA always uses “and.” And the parenthetical’s second element differs: MLA pairs the author with a page number and no comma, APA pairs the author with a year after a comma. Side by side: MLA (Boers et al. 74) versus APA (Boers et al., 2017, p. 74). The full comparison lives in MLA vs APA.

Common mistakes

A comma before et al. in the parenthetical. (Johnson, et al. 172) is wrong; (Johnson et al. 172) is right. The comma belongs only in the Works Cited entry, where it marks the inverted first name. This error is common enough to appear in some library guides, so seeing it in print is no defense.

Italicizing et al., or misspelling it. MLA sets the abbreviation roman in citations and entries. And it is “et al.” exactly — no period after “et,” always a period after “al.”

Using et al. for two authors. A two-author work names both authors every time, in the entry and in-text. Collapsing at two is not an MLA option (or an APA one).

An ampersand between the names. (Dorris & Erdrich 23) is APA leaking through. MLA writes “and” — in the Works Cited entry, in parentheticals, everywhere.

Inverting both names in the Works Cited entry. Only the first author flips to Last, First — the inversion exists solely to alphabetize the entry. “Dorris, Michael, and Erdrich, Louise” is wrong; “Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich” is right.

Listing all three-plus authors in the entry. Spelling out every name was the MLA 7 rule for three authors (and an option for more), and old citations copied from databases still model it. Under MLA 9 the entry is first author plus et al., period.

Using et al. in your prose. In sentences, MLA wants “Burdick and others” or all the names spelled out. Save et al. for the parenthetical and the Works Cited list.

The principle under all of it: an in-text citation is the shortest string that points a reader unambiguously to the first words of one Works Cited entry. With two authors, both names do that job; at three or more, the first author plus et al. does it — and the punctuation differs between entry and parenthetical only because one inverts the name and the other does not.

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