MLA citations in Markdown

MLA is the style of English departments and the humanities: the author and a page number in the text, no year, and a Works Cited list at the end. Grasmere writes MLA, 9th edition, from sources you add by ISBN or DOI, while the essay stays a Markdown file.

What comes out

In the text, the author’s surname and the page, nothing else, with “et al.” from three authors and a short title where there’s no author:

(Field 12)
(Field and Baker 50)
(Field et al.)
(Field, ch. 3)
(“How Sourdough Rises”)

In the list, headed Works Cited:

Field, Rosa. The Living Loaf: A History of Sourdough. 2nd ed., Riverbank Press, 2019.

Field, Rosa, and Tom Baker. “Wild Yeasts in Rye Starters.” Food Microbiology, vol. 12, no. 3, 2019, pp. 45–67, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fm.2019.01.002.

Field, Rosa. “How Sourdough Rises.” The Loaf, 14 Mar. 2026, example.com/sourdough.

The 9th edition’s habits are kept: “vol.” and “no.”, the date written 14 Mar. 2026, a web address without “https://”, and the container in italics.

How to set it

1. Add your sources. Project ▸ New Source with an ISBN fills in a book from Open Library, a DOI fills in an article, and a web address saves the page. Project ▸ Import Sources reads a BibTeX or CSL JSON export from Zotero.
2. Cite by typing [@ and choosing the source. Add the page.
3. When you export to PDF or Word, choose MLA 9 under Citations. The choice is kept with the project.

In the Markdown, a citation is a link to the source’s file, [Field 2019, p. 12](../research/The%20Living%20Loaf.md). The year in the link text is for you; MLA leaves it out when the citation is written. See citations in Markdown without BibTeX.

Quoting

Essays in MLA lean on quotation. In Grasmere a source is read in its own pane, and a highlighted passage can be quoted into the essay with its citation attached, so the page number is never guessed. Block quotations are Markdown blockquotes, >, and are set as such in the PDF.

Questions

Is it MLA 8 or 9?

The 9th edition, from 2021. The two are close; the 9th mostly clarifies the 8th.

What about a poem or a play?

Lines are among the locators, along with pages, chapters, paragraphs, sections, notes and figures. Acts and scenes aren’t, so write those citations by hand.

Does it do the MLA heading and running header?

No. Your name, course and date at the top left, and the surname and page number in the header, are added in Word after export, or set once in a Word template.

Related

• Citations in Markdown without BibTeX
• Chicago author-date in Markdown
• A Markdown editor for students
• Markdown to Word
• More on writing in Markdown

Last updated 10 November 2026.