By the Deslop desk · Published 16 Aug 2026 · MLA 9th edition
You are citing a page from a government health site. The organisation clearly wrote it. Their name is on every screen.
So you put the organisation in the author slot, then again as the publisher, and it looks thorough. It is also wrong, and it is the most common error in MLA works-cited lists.
MLA has a rule for exactly this, and almost every free generator breaks it. Ours did too, until we fixed it this week.
The reason is that MLA is built from core elements in a fixed order, and each element is meant to appear once. Naming the same organisation as author and as publisher is repetition, not thoroughness.
There is a second layer. When you are citing from a site whose name is basically the publisher's name, MLA drops both the author and the publisher, and the entry opens with the page title followed by the site.
Each entry below came out of our own citation generator with MLA selected.
MLA gives full first names, not initials. Note the in-text citation has no year in it. MLA is author and page, not author and date, so a webpage with no page numbers gives you just the surname.
The organisation has moved out of the author slot and into the publisher slot. The site brand stays in italics as the container.
Author gone, publisher gone, organisation named once as the container. This is the form MLA's own guidance shows.
Identical shape to situation three. That is the useful part: in MLA, no author and organisation author often land in the same place.
One question decides it. Is the thing you are citing a whole work, or a part of a bigger one?
A page on a website is a part. It gets quotation marks. The website is the whole that contains it, so it gets italics. The same logic covers a poem in an anthology and an episode of a series.
This differs from APA, where a webpage title is italicised. If you write in both styles across different subjects, that is the swap most likely to catch you out. It also affects the in-text citation, because MLA formats the shortened title the same way the entry formats the full one, so a webpage gives you quotation marks in both places.
The protocol. MLA drops http:// and https:// from URLs. An entry should end with www.example.com/page. Most generators leave the protocol in, so this is a quick way to spot one that has not been updated.
The date format. MLA abbreviates most month names: 16 Nov. 2023, not 16 November 2023. May, June and July are short enough to be written out.
Two things, both found while writing this page.
Our MLA output named the organisation twice, exactly as the red box above shows. And when the entry correctly began with the title, the in-text citation still gave the organisation, so the two did not match. MLA's guidance is direct that the text must key to the works-cited list, and ours did not.
Both are fixed and both are covered by tests now. We are telling you because writing the guide is what exposed the bug, and because a tool that hides its failures is worth less than one that publishes them.
Page title in quotation marks, site name in italics, no protocol on the URL. When an organisation is both author and publisher, name it once and start with the title. Then make your in-text citation match whatever the entry starts with, which is the step people skip.
Build the citation free, nothing leaves your browser →Sources: MLA Style Center on sources with no author, on organisations as authors, and on works cited from a website with the same name as its publisher, which gives the "Education." New York Public Library example this guide follows. MLA Handbook, 9th edition, sections 5.17 to 5.19 on corporate authors, and page 42 on omitting publisher information. Our own output: generated 16 August 2026 with the Deslop citation engine, tested across 126 combinations of source type, style and missing information. More: citation generator · all articles.