The location of an online work is typically indicated by a DOI or URL, one of which should be included, and, as the MLA Handbook states, “For online works, the location, in order of preference, is the DOI, permalink, or URL” (188). So include a DOI instead of a URL if it’s available. If the work is paginated and forms part of a larger work, such as an anthology or periodical, you may provide the page range in addition to the URL or DOI. You may elect to do so if it is useful for your reader to have more information about the work—for example, about its length, its sequence in the collection, or the fact that it can be navigated by pages. The entries below, for a work in a single container, show two acceptable ways to cite a paginated article in a journal that is published only online:

Berman, Russell. “The Necessity of Language Learning.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1632/adfl.43.2.11.

Berman, Russell. “The Necessity of Language Learning.” ADFL Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 11-14, https://doi.org/10.1632/adfl.43.2.11.

If the work has more than one container and the location of the first container is a page range, as in the example below for a print work that later appeared online, do not provide the page range again as the location for the second container:

Goldman, Anne. “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante.” The Georgia Review, vol. 64, no. 1, 2010, pp. 69-88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41403188.

Work Cited

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021.