[MUSIC PLAYING] INSTRUCTOR: This video is a brief introduction to the eighth edition of MLA style. For more complete information, please look at the overview on the MLA's own website or consult the manual. Librarians and the Writing Center staff can help too. 

Just to review, there are two main reasons to document your sources. The old familiar reason is to avoid plagiarism. The other reason is that you are participating in a scholarly conversation. By documenting your sources, you establish your own credibility and place your work into the flow of that conversation. None of this has changed with MLA's new edition. 

So what has changed? MLA now defines their citation style very broadly so that one template can be used for most works. For the new style, there are some new definitions and a new term. 

The work you cite is always called the source. But when that work is also part of a larger whole, the larger work is called the container. It's analogous to having a single serving pie versus a slice from a large pie. We'll go through some examples, so you can see how this works. 

Start by asking yourself is the work complete all by itself, or is it also part of a larger work. When we're citing an entire book, then the book is the whole thing. It is the source and does not have a container. 

But when you're citing a chapter from a book, then the chapter is the source, and the book is the container. This applies when you cite a single chapter, regardless of the authorship. The idea of containers is probably clearest for articles or sources in magazines and journals or containers. 

Here's a table with examples of sources and their containers when there is one. But in a library, things can get more complicated because articles and books are often provided within a database. There could be two containers for a source. 

Here's another analogy. The source is like the smallest of these nesting dolls. The journal is the little doll, and the database is the largest doll. 

MLA has identified core elements of information or facts common to most works. Find them for each source and each container if there is one. Remember, that usually you will not find all elements. 

How the elements are ordered in this table is also how you'll order them in citations. Don't worry about finding the perfect way to cite an item. MLA clearly states that there are often several options. That's because the main goal for your citations is to make them useful to your reader, and of course, find out your instructor's preferences. 

Let's look at a specific example, an article in the print magazine Popular Science. Here's the table of the core elements I can find for the article and how the citation will look in the works cited list. Things to notice, the author's last name comes first. The article title is in quotation marks. The magazine title is in italics. 

This article is on pages that are not consecutive. Therefore, we indicate the beginning page but not the ending page. Instead, there's a plus symbol. 

Here's the same article, but now we'll cite it as coming from a database. Therefore, there are two containers. Just add the database core facts to the other elements. Things to notice, there are now two location fields in the table, one for the articles page numbers and one for the database URL. 

Always omit the http://. Look for the URL designated durable or permanent found in most databases. In ProQuest, you can find it on the Abstract Details tab. Here's what the citation looks like. The database title is in italics, just like the magazine title. 

For this article, I'm showing you a section of the PDF because there is something new for MLA here, DOI or Digital Object Identifier. This is a unique and permanent identifying number most commonly found on scholarly sources. You can find it sometimes in the PDF, sometimes in the database record. 

When it is available, MLA now recommends using this number instead of a database URL. Things to notice, when there are more than two authors, name only the first author and add the Latin phrase et al. For the DOI, also omit the http://. If you still have questions, ask a librarian.