How to Credit Publishers

The publisher is the group or organization that produced the source or made it available after it was created. Sometimes there is no publisher, or it may not need to be included. See the Leave Out the Publisher section below (pp. 164-65).

Listing the Publisher’s Name (p. 172)

• Enter the publisher's entire name, but leave out business words such as Company (Co.), Corporation (Corp.), Incorporated (Inc.), and Limited (Ltd.).
• Also leave out a, an, or the when it is the first word of a publisher's name.
• Change an ampersand or a plus sign in a publisher’s name to this: and.

               Farrar & Rinehart => Farrar and Rinehart

More Than One Publisher (p. 170)

• Only list the first organization.
  
  

Websites and Blogs (p. 167)

• Websites can be published by individuals or different types of organizations and companies. 
• The publisher’s name may be found on the bottom of the page by the copyright date or on an “about” page.

When an Organization or Government Agency is Both the Author and the Publisher (p. 119)

• Do not list the organization as the Author. Leave the Author box blank, and begin the citation with the Title.
• List the organization as the Publisher.
  
  

Organization as Publisher (pp. 170-71)

• If the organization listed in the source has many parts, enter the parts from largest to smallest, and separate them with commas. 

               American Library Association, American Association of School Libraries

Government Agency as Publisher (p. 171)

• If the government agency listed in the source has many parts, shorten the name by only keeping the government name and the primary agency. 

Publisher as listed in source:  U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Publisher as listed in citation:  U.S. Department of Justice

Leave Out the Publisher When the Source Is... (p. 165)

• A magazine or newspaper
• A website whose title is basically the same as the name of its publisher
• A website not involved in producing the works it makes available (ex: a service for users’ content like WordPress or YouTube; a library database such as Gale In Context: Elementary or National Geographic Kids). 

Resources

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

The MLA Style Center: Writing Resources from the Modern Language Association. Modern Language Association of America, 2021, style.mla.org.