 The Modern Language Association's style for citations is most commonly used to cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. So a lot of instructors in English, literature and art classes will ask you to create MLA citations. You'll want to be sure to cite any facts or ideas in your paper that you didn't think of yourself, unless they're common knowledge. Common knowledge includes things that you could expect most people reading your paper to know, something they could just accept as true without having to look it up. To cite a source, you'll create an in-text citation and a bibliographic entry. The in-text citation is right in your paper and tells the reader which person you got your fact or idea from. If you're copying someone's exact words, you'll put their words in quotation marks. If there's extra information that would help the reader find the fact, idea or quote, like a page number, then add that in parentheses right after the fact or idea. You can either give the author's name right in your paper or add it to the note in parentheses. The bibliographic entry is on an extra page at the end of the paper. This page is called the works cited page and it's an alphabetical list of every source you got your facts, ideas and quotes from for your paper. The works cited page is formatted with a hanging indent. The bibliographic entries give the reader all the information they would need to find your sources in a library or on the web if they wanted to look them up and read them. For each bibliographic entry, there are nine core elements that a reader would probably need in order to find the source you used. You'll want to include as many of these core elements that apply to your source. You'll find you won't need to use all nine core elements for every source. For example, look at this song from Beyonce that the writer found on Beyonce's webpage. In most cases, other contributors version and number don't apply to the source. But wait, what if your paper was all about songwriters and you talked about this song's writers at great length in your paper? Well, in that case, the type of person looking up and reading your paper must be really interested in songwriters. So you would want to list the songwriter in the other contributor spot. Or wait, what if you listened to a version of the song that the reader wouldn't expect? Maybe an obscure remix. Well then, you'd want to let the reader know the version. Or what if you listened to the song on a CD? Then the number of the song would help someone find it on the CD, so you'd include the number. You might even find that for a few different sources, you'd need to include some elements that aren't on this list. The bottom line is that you need to think about your source and the reader and use your best judgment. When you're just starting out, you'll need to look at a lot of examples to get the hang of it. If you visit the library's webpage, you'll see that we have a handout for MLA citations that gives a lot of examples. We also have a service called Noodle Tools that guides you through creating citations and your work cited page step by step. Remember, if you have any questions about citations, contact a librarian.