Is this MLA 9 citation generator free?

Yes, with no sign-up. Anonymous use covers 30 reference checks a day; a free Phở account raises that to 300 a month.

How do I cite a journal article in MLA 9?

Paste its DOI or PubMed ID above and choose MLA 9. For example, 10.1038/nature14539 becomes: LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

Why does the tool change details I typed?

Because it looked the paper up and the publisher’s record disagrees. The warnings under each citation list exactly what changed, so you can check.

MLA Citation Generator (MLA 9th edition)

Paste a DOI, PubMed ID or reference and get it in MLA 9, built from the real Crossref or PubMed record so the details are right.

MLA 9 example

The paper Deep learning by LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (Nature, 2015), formatted by this tool from DOI 10.1038/nature14539:

LeCun, Yann, et al. “Deep Learning.” Nature, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

In text: (LeCun et al.)

Who uses MLA 9

Literature, languages, cultural studies and many humanities courses.

MLA 9 reference rules

Name the first author surname first ("LeCun, Yann"); with two authors give both; with three or more give the first followed by "et al."
Put article titles in quotation marks and Title Case.
Italicise the journal (the "container"), then give volume, issue, year and pages: vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436–44.
Add the DOI at the end when there is one.
Title the list "Works Cited" and order it alphabetically.

In-text citations

Author and page in parentheses with no comma: (LeCun et al. 437). For two authors: (Smith and Jones 12).

Common mistakes

Leaving out "vol." and "no." labels, which MLA 9 keeps.
Putting the year in parentheses after the author, which is APA, not MLA.

How this generator avoids wrong references

Every reference is looked up in Crossref, PubMed and OpenAlex before it is formatted. When the database record disagrees with what you pasted (a year off by one, a missing co-author, pages from a different issue) the citation is built from the record and you see what changed. A paper that cannot be found is still formatted, exactly as typed, but marked as unverified, and a retracted paper is flagged in red. Always check your institution's or journal's own guidance: many add small house rules on top of the official style.

Other styles

APA 7 · Chicago author-date · Harvard · Vancouver · IEEE · AMA 11