How to Make a Works Cited Page (MLA): Format & Examples
The Works Cited page is the alphabetical list of sources at the end of an MLA paper. It is the part graders check first and the part students lose the most easy marks on — not because the entries are hard to build, but because the page mechanics (ordering, indentation, spacing, the heading) are exacting and easy to get subtly wrong. This guide is a focused how-to for the page itself: how to set it up, how to order it, and what a finished list actually looks like.
The shortest version: start a new page, center the heading Works Cited in plain text, alphabetize by the first author’s surname, give every entry a half-inch hanging indent, and double-space the whole thing with no extra gaps between entries.
What a Works Cited page is
A Works Cited page lists every source you cite in the body of the paper — and nothing else. The relationship is one-to-one: every in-text citation points to an entry here, and every entry is cited at least once in the text. Sources you read but never cited do not belong; that is a Bibliography, which is a different deliverable. If you are unsure which heading your assignment needs, see Works Cited vs. Bibliography. For the research-to-list workflow — tracking sources as you read so the page assembles itself — see Research and the Works Cited page.
This guide covers the MLA 9 Works Cited page. Building the individual entries from MLA’s nine core elements is covered in the main MLA guide; here the focus is the page.
Page setup
The Works Cited page starts on its own page at the end of the paper. Insert a page break after your conclusion so the list never shares a page with body text, and keep the running header — your last name and the page number — in the top-right corner, continuing the paper’s numbering.
Center the heading Works Cited at the top of the page, one inch from the top, in the same font and size as the rest of the paper. Do not bold, italicize, underline, or quote it, and do not add a colon. (Bolding the heading is APA’s rule, not MLA’s.) If your list contains a single source, the heading is Work Cited, singular.
The entire page is double-spaced — within each entry and between entries alike. There are no extra blank lines separating one source from the next; the consistent double spacing is what visually separates them.
Alphabetical order
MLA orders the list alphabetically by the first author’s surname, letter by letter. A few rules cover the edge cases:
- No named author: alphabetize by the first significant word of the title, ignoring a leading A, An, or The. A web article titled “The Cognitive Load Problem” files under C.
- Corporate or government author: alphabetize by the first word of the organization name (again ignoring a leading article). An entry beginning United States, Department of Education files under U.
- Two works by one author: alphabetize them between themselves by title, and replace the repeated name in the second and later entries with three hyphens followed by a period (
---.).
The page is never numbered. Numbering a reference list is a numeric-style convention (IEEE, Vancouver, AMA); MLA stays alphabetical.
The hanging indent
Every entry takes a half-inch hanging indent: the first line sits flush against the left margin, and every subsequent line of the same entry is indented half an inch. This makes the alphabetizing surnames line up down the left edge so a reader can scan them quickly. Do not create the indent by pressing Tab or the spacebar at the start of each wrapped line — set it through your paragraph settings so it survives editing. The hanging indents guide walks through the exact steps in Word, Google Docs, and Pages.
A worked Works Cited list
Below is a complete six-entry Works Cited page in MLA 9, shown in correct alphabetical order. In your document, each of these would carry a half-inch hanging indent and the page would be double-spaced throughout.
| Alphabetized under | Works Cited entry |
|---|---|
| Alvarez | Alvarez, Sofia. “How Working Memory Predicts Reading Comprehension.” Psychology Today, 12 Mar. 2023, www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/working-memory-reading-comprehension. Accessed 20 May 2026. |
| Chen | Chen, Margaret S. The Architecture of Working Memory. Cambridge University Press, 2021. |
| Goldstein | Goldstein, Aaron, et al. “Sleep Consolidation Effects on Procedural Learning in Adolescents.” Journal of Cognitive Development, vol. 19, no. 2, 2024, pp. 87–104. https://doi.org/10.1037/cogdev0000412. |
| Kowalski | Kowalski, Elena R. Memory Consolidation in Bilingual Speakers: An fMRI Investigation. 2020. University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. |
| Lin | Lin, David K., and Hannah J. Patel. “Cross-Modal Attention in Early Development.” Handbook of Developmental Cognition, edited by Rachel T. Morrison, Routledge, 2022, pp. 142–168. |
| Tanaka | Tanaka, Yuki, and Marcus Hoffmann. “A Unified Model of Attention in Dual-Task Performance.” Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 4–6 Nov. 2022, pp. 412–419. |
Notice the ordering: Alvarez before Chen before Goldstein, surname by surname. Only the first author’s name is inverted (surname first); a second author — Hannah J. Patel in the Lin entry — stays in normal order. Book and journal titles are italicized; article and chapter titles take quotation marks; everything uses title case. The web entry carries an access date because the page can change; the fixed-date journal article does not.
Common mistakes
Bolding or quoting the heading. Works Cited is plain, centered text. Bold is APA; quotation marks belong to no style.
Numbering the entries. MLA is alphabetical, never numbered. Numbering signals a numeric style and breaks the convention a grader expects.
Faking the hanging indent with spaces or tabs. Set it in paragraph settings; manual spacing falls apart the moment the text reflows.
Adding blank lines between entries. The page is uniformly double-spaced — the spacing already separates entries. Extra returns are an error.
Including sources you did not cite. Read-but-uncited sources belong on a Bibliography, not a Works Cited page.
Enter your sources into the generator and it assembles each entry — punctuation, italics, and hanging indent — in correct MLA 9 form, alphabetized and ready to paste.