How can I create bibliography in MLA format with BibTeX?

Question

I know how to create a bibliography of the MLA style manually:

\begin{thebibliography}{9}
  \bibitem{Poz}
    Pozrikidis, C. \emph{Boundary Integral And Singularity Methods For Linearized Viscous Flow}. Cambridge [England] : Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.

\end{thebibliography}

The link about BibTeX gives the following description:

If a document references this handbook, the bibliographic information may be formatted in different ways depending on which citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago etc.) is employed. The way LaTeX deals with this is by specifying \cite commands and the desired bibliography style in the LaTeX document.

It does not mention how can the bibliographic information be formatted in different style.

Question:
How can I create the bibliography automatically with BibTeX with the same MLA style? (Window Vista, MiKTeX, WinEdt 6.0)

[EDITED: ]Are there other ways to create the bibliography in MLA style in LaTeX?

Answer 1

The biblatex-mla package seems to do a good job with basic MLA style citations and bibliographies. Here is an example of how to use it. You need to run latex biber latex latex to get everything to look right.

Update (July, 2016) It seems that development of biblatex-mla has resumed. Using the latest version on CTAN this example compiles properly. I would strongly recommend you update your TeX distribution to TL 2016 instead of manually installing the package, since there have been many changes to both biblatex and biber which will also need to be updated, so manual updating will likely lead to package dependency conflicts.

Various previous problems with biblatex-mla may have been fixed with this new version, so the warning on the previous version of this answer may not apply.

Previous Warning

As the comments have mentioned, and also this question: biblatex-mla sometimes \autocite[prenote][pg]{key} is not printing the author's name there seem to be significant problems with biblatex-mla which hasn't been updated for some time. It may need to be used with biblatex version 1.0.

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=mla,backend=biber]{biblatex}


\begin{filecontents}{mla-test-bib.bib}


@article{Kavanaugh1976,
    Author = {Kavanaugh, Robert D.},
    Journal = {Child Development},
    Month = {Sep},
    Number = {3},
    Pages = {885-887},
    Title = {On the Synonymity of `more' and `less': Comments on a Methodology},
    Volume = {47},
    Year = {1976}}


@book{Saussure1995,
    Author = {Ferdinand de Saussure},
    Publisher = {Payot},
    Title = {Cours de Linguistique G{\'e}n{\'e}rale},
    Year = {1995}}

\end{filecontents} % This is the end of the sample bibliography

\addbibresource{mla-test-bib.bib} % you would use your own bib file here
\begin{document}
This is a citation. \autocite{Saussure1995}. Another citation \autocite{Kavanaugh1976}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

If you need footnote citations, use the package option autocite=footnote and add the following code to your preamble (based on the solution posted here: Biblatex-mla gives me a \smartcite error).

\DeclareAutoCiteCommand{footnote}[f]{\footcite}{\footcites}

If you need to change the title of the bibliography to something other than "Works Cited", add the following code to your preamble:

\defbibheading{bibliography}{%
    \section*{Bibliography}}   %use \chapter* if the bibliography will be a chapter

Answer 2

I found this package online called MLA13 that does everything for you. I used it in quite a few of my papers already. The thing that's good about it is that it uses your .bib files and formats everything according to MLA standards.

The website for this is:

Documentation: https://github.com/jackson13info/mla13/blob/master/Documentation.pdf

Github: https://github.com/jackson13info/mla13

This package allows you to format your entire document and to create the works cited in mla format you simply type \makeworkscited and it will format the entire page using your bibtex file.

Answer 3

It looks like the mla package helps with this.

From that page:

To use the bibliography feature,

1. Use \begin{workscited} to start the bibliography. There is no need to declare a new page or even type "Works Cited" at the top of the page.

2. Use \bibent before each entry.

3. Put \end{workscited} at the end.

4. There is no reason to use BiBTeX or any of the other bibliography packages

And an example of a Works Cited entry from the page:

\bibent

author's last name, first name. ``Paper Title." \textit{Book Title}. Date of publication.