Examples of Commonly Cited Sources

To cite the book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho, you would follow the format described in this section, choosing only the core elements that are available for a published print book. In that case, you would use the following elements and punctuate them the way they are punctuated below:

Author (last name, first name): Ho, Karen Zouwen.

Title: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.

Publisher: Duke University Press,

Publication date: 2009.

Complete citation:

Ho, Karen Zouwen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press, 2009.

For books with a single author, you do not need to list any other elements. For other types of sources, you will need to pick other relevant elements that will help interested readers locate the source.

If you were going to cite Amanda Michiko Shigihara’s article about restaurant employees, “‘I Mean, Define Meaningful!’: Accounts of Meaningfulness among Restaurant Employees,” you would need to decide which core elements a reader would need to locate the version of the article that you read. 

You would start with the author and title.

Author: Shigihara, Amanda Michiko.

Title: “‘I Mean, Define Meaningful!’: Accounts of Meaningfulness among Restaurant Employees.”

Because this is a journal article, your readers need to know which “container” they need to find in order to locate the article. In this case, the container is a journal called Qualitative Sociology Review. So, this would be listed next:

Container: Qualitative Sociology Review

Since there are multiple issues of this journal, your readers also need to know which issue of the journal to look for. That means you should also supply the volume and/or issue number. In this case, the journal provides both a volume and an issue number:

Number: vol. 15, no. 1

Publication Date: May 2019

Location: pp. 106-31. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.15.1.05.

Complete citation:

Shigihara, Amanda Michiko. “‘I Mean, Define Meaningful!’: Accounts of Meaningfulness among Restaurant Employees.” Qualitative Sociology Review, vol. 15, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 106–31. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.15.1.05.

If you wanted to cite a page from website version of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, you would begin by looking to see if there is an author listed on the page.  There is no single author credited for the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, so you would begin your citation the page about MLA citations with the title of the page.

Title: “MLA”

You would then include the title of the whole web site, since that is the container in which the MLA page is located: Harvard Guide to Using Sources.

Then you would include the location: https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu

Since there is no publication date for each article listed on this site, you would include the date you accessed the website at the end of your citation.

“MLA.” Harvard Guide to Using Sources. https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu. Accessed 15 October 2022.

To cite an article published on a website that does provide publication dates, you should list the article’s publication date instead of an access date. While access dates appear at the end of the citation, publication dates appear before the location of the source.

Strub, Spencer. “Pandemics have long created labor shortages. Here’s why.” The Washington Post, 3 June 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/03/pandemics-have-long-created-labor-shortages-heres-why/.