How to Cite a Conference Paper in MLA 9

To cite a conference paper in MLA 9, first decide what you actually read or heard. A paper that was only presented is cited as an event: presenter, title in quotation marks, conference name, date, venue. A paper printed in published proceedings is cited like a chapter in an edited book: author, title in quotation marks, italicized proceedings title, editors, publisher, year, pages. The MLA Style Center gives one example for each, and this guide builds every other case (database PDFs, posters, panels, recordings, virtual conferences) from those two patterns.

The official MLA 9 rule

The MLA Handbook, 9th edition (2021), has no entry type called "conference paper." It has a template of core elements that you fill in for any source: Author, Title of Source, Title of Container, Contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication Date, Location. What changes between a presented paper and a published one is which elements carry information.

Format, paper presented at a conference:

Presenter Last Name, First Name. "Title of Paper." Name of Conference, Day Month Year, Venue, City.

Format, paper published in conference proceedings:

Author Last Name, First Name. "Title of Paper." Title of Proceedings, edited by Editor Names, Publisher, Year, pp. first-last.

The MLA's own examples. For a presented paper, the Style Center's answer to "How do I cite a paper presented at a virtual conference?" reads:

Curnutt, Kirk. "A Meme-able Feast: Teaching Modernist Citationality and Hemingway Iconography." MLA Annual Convention, 7 Jan. 2021, online.

For a published paper, the Style Center's answer to "How do I cite conference proceedings?" reads:

Hualde, José Ignacio. "Patterns of Correspondence in the Adaptation of Spanish Borrowings in Basque." Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1999: General Session and Parasession on Loan Word Phenomena, edited by Steven S. Chang et al., Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2000, pp. 348-58.

Four details in those two entries do most of the work:

• The conference name is the container for a presented paper. It sits in roman type, no italics and no quotation marks, because a conference is an event. The Style Center's phrasing is that the conference goes "in the Title of Container element, followed by the date on which the paper was presented."
• The proceedings title is italicized for a published paper. Proceedings are a book, so the title takes italics and the paper inside it takes quotation marks, exactly as a chapter in an edited collection does. Our guide to citing a book chapter in MLA 9 walks through that pattern in full.
• The date is the day of the talk, written day-month-year. MLA abbreviates months longer than four letters: 7 Jan. 2021, 23 May 2003, 12 Sept. 2024. A published paper takes the year of publication instead, which can be a year or two after the conference.
• The location is a place for a presented paper and a page range for a published one. "Online" is the location for a virtual conference. Pages take "pp." and MLA drops repeated digits in the range: 348-58, 4171-86.

What changed from MLA 7

If your department's sample paper predates 2016, it probably shows this form:

Stein, Bob. "Reading and Writing in the Digital Era." Discovering Digital Dimensions. Computers and Writing Conference. Union Club Hotel, West Lafayette, IN. 23 May 2003. Keynote Address.

MLA 8 (2016) replaced the period-separated string with the container template: commas inside the container, the date moved ahead of the venue, and the descriptive label at the end became optional. MLA 9 kept all of that and added more examples. The "Print." and "Web." medium labels disappeared in the same change. If a guide still ends entries with a medium, it is a seventh-edition guide.

Worked examples

Each example gives the Works Cited entry, then the in-text citation. MLA in-text citations are author and page for every source type: (Hualde 350) in parentheses, or the author's name in the sentence with the page alone in parentheses. A presented paper has no pages, so it is cited by name alone: (Curnutt). The complete guide to in-text citations covers the variations.

1. Paper presented at a conference, in person

You sat in the room and took notes, or the presenter sent you the text afterward and nothing has been published.

Stein, Bob. "Reading and Writing in the Digital Era." Discovering Digital Dimensions, Computers and Writing Conference, 23 May 2003, Union Club Hotel, West Lafayette, IN.

In-text: (Stein), or Stein's name in the sentence with no parenthetical.

This is the Purdue OWL example rebuilt in the MLA 9 template. Two containers of naming appear here because the 2003 conference had a theme title ("Discovering Digital Dimensions") and a series name ("Computers and Writing Conference"). When a conference has only one name, use only that.

2. Paper presented at a virtual conference

The Style Center's rule: cite it "the same way you would cite a paper presented at a physical conference," and write "online" in the Location element.

Curnutt, Kirk. "A Meme-able Feast: Teaching Modernist Citationality and Hemingway Iconography." MLA Annual Convention, 7 Jan. 2021, online.

In-text: (Curnutt)

A hybrid conference where you watched the stream from home is also "online." Cite what you experienced. If you later watched a recording the organizers posted, see example 7, because the recording becomes the source.

3. Paper in published proceedings, book form

The most common case for engineering, computer science and linguistics students. The proceedings volume is the container; the editors, publisher and year follow it; the page range closes the entry.

Hualde, José Ignacio. "Patterns of Correspondence in the Adaptation of Spanish Borrowings in Basque." Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1999: General Session and Parasession on Loan Word Phenomena, edited by Steven S. Chang et al., Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2000, pp. 348-58.

In-text: (Hualde 352)

Note the year. The meeting was in 1999; the volume appeared in 2000. The entry takes 2000, because you are citing the printed text. The conference date survives only because it is part of the published title.

4. Paper in proceedings with a DOI, read online

Most proceedings now live in a digital library (ACL Anthology, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink). MLA 9 treats the library as a second container and prefers a DOI to a URL when one exists, written as a full https://doi.org/ link.

Devlin, Jacob, et al. "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding." Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), edited by Jill Burstein et al., Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019, pp. 4171-86. ACL Anthology, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423.

In-text: (Devlin et al. 4173)

Four authors on the paper become "Devlin, Jacob, et al." MLA uses "et al." for three or more authors in both the entry and the in-text citation. The editors get the same treatment after "edited by."

5. Paper in a numbered proceedings series

Some proceedings are numbered like a journal volume. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems is the best-known case: each year's NeurIPS papers appear as a numbered volume from Curran Associates. The volume number goes in the Number element, after the editors.

Vaswani, Ashish, et al. "Attention Is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, edited by Isabelle Guyon et al., Curran Associates, 2017, pp. 5998-6008.

In-text: (Vaswani et al. 6001)

Whether to write the number as part of the italicized title or as a separate element after the editors is a judgment call the Handbook leaves open. Library catalogs list these volumes with the number in the title, so keeping it there is the defensible choice. Be consistent across your list.

6. Poster presentation

MLA has no separate poster format. A poster is a presented work with a presenter, a title, a conference and a date, so it takes the presented-paper pattern. If the session type matters to your reader, add a descriptive label at the end of the entry; the Handbook allows a supplemental description at the end of any entry whose source type is not obvious.

Okafor, Adaeze. "Heat Stress and Night-Shift Nursing in Lagos Teaching Hospitals." Nigerian Public Health Conference, 14 Nov. 2024, Eko Hotel, Lagos. Poster presentation.

In-text: (Okafor)

The names in this entry are illustrative. The pattern is what to copy.

7. Conference session you watched as a recording

The Style Center is specific on this point: "if you rely on the recording as your source, cite the recording." The video's hosting site is the container, its upload date is the date, and the URL is the location. The live conference may appear as a description, or it may be obvious from the title.

Kapoor, Sanjna, and Tom Stoppard, panelists. "Panel Discussion: Theatre and Memory." ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, 24 Jan. 2018, Diggi Palace, Jaipur, India.

That is the live-event form, adapted from the Style Center's own panel example, for someone who was in the audience. If you instead watched it later on YouTube, cite the YouTube video, with the uploader, upload date and URL, as in our guide to citing a YouTube video. The live date and venue then drop out, because the recording is what you consulted.

8. Unpublished paper the author sent you

A conference paper that exists only as a PDF in your inbox is an unpublished manuscript. The Style Center's rule for unpublished student papers applies: author, title in quotation marks, date, then optional information about the occasion at the end.

Lindqvist, Maren. "Reading Sámi Joik as Archive." 2025. Paper presented at the Nordic Literature Association Conference, Tromsø, 9 May 2025.

In-text: (Lindqvist 4), if the PDF has page numbers.

The presenter's own pagination counts, because it is the document you read. If the PDF has no page numbers, cite the author alone.

Special cases

The paper appeared in proceedings and later in a journal

Cite what you read. Many proceedings papers are revised and expanded into journal articles, sometimes under a new title. If you read the journal version, cite it as a journal article in MLA 9 and leave the proceedings out. If the two versions differ and you drew on both, give each its own entry.

You are citing another paper from the same proceedings as your own

The Style Center's answer is to skip the Works Cited entry. If your paper appears in a proceedings volume and you refer to another paper in the same volume, "make clear in your prose that the other papers are included in the proceedings," with a phrase such as "In an essay on Toni Morrison in these proceedings, Barbara Anderson writes." Page numbers are optional. This rule applies only when your own paper is in the volume; a student citing a proceedings paper in a term paper always writes a full entry.

The presenter is also the chair, or the paper had no named presenter

If the program lists a paper by title only, start the entry with the title. MLA treats a missing author the same way for every source type: skip the element and alphabetize by the first main word of the title. For a session chaired by one person with several speakers, cite the specific speaker whose words you are using, as in examples 1 and 2. The chair's name belongs in the entry only if the chair is the person you are citing.

A keynote or plenary address

Same pattern as example 1, with the optional label "Keynote address" or "Plenary address" at the end if you want the reader to know the session type. Purdue OWL ends its Stein entry with "Keynote Address"; MLA 9 allows that label and leaves its capitalization to you, so sentence case ("Keynote address") matches the Handbook's other descriptions.

The conference has a theme title and an organization name

Write both, theme first, organization second, separated by a comma, as in example 1: "Discovering Digital Dimensions, Computers and Writing Conference." If the organization's name is already inside the conference name ("MLA Annual Convention"), write it once.

Abstract only

Some programs print abstracts and nothing else. If the abstract is all you read, cite the abstract. Start with the presenter, then "Abstract of" before the title in quotation marks, then the container (a program booklet, a conference website, a database), date and location or URL. Never cite the paper as though you read the full text.

Two papers by the same presenter at the same conference

The Works Cited entries are alphabetized by title, and the second entry replaces the author's name with three em dashes followed by a period (the Handbook's convention for repeated authors). In the text, add a shortened title: (Stein, "Reading") and (Stein, "Archive").

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Italicizing the conference name. A conference is an event, so its name is in roman type. Only a published proceedings title takes italics. The Style Center's Curnutt example shows "MLA Annual Convention" in plain text.
• Using the conference year for a published paper. The date element is the year the volume was published. Hualde's paper is dated 2000, a year after the 1999 meeting.
• Putting the venue before the date. MLA 7 did this; MLA 8 and 9 reversed it. The template order is container, date, location: "MLA Annual Convention, 7 Jan. 2021, online."
• Writing "Print." or "Web." at the end. The medium element was removed in 2016.
• Citing the live talk when you watched a recording. The Style Center's rule is to cite the recording. The uploader, upload date and URL replace the venue and the presentation date.
• Dropping the page range for a published paper. A proceedings paper has pages, and the in-text citation needs them. Find them on the PDF's first page or on the digital library's record.
• A proxy URL. ezproxy.yourlibrary.edu/login?url=https://dl.acm.org/... works only on your campus. Strip the proxy prefix, or better, use the DOI.
• "Accessed" dates on every entry. MLA 9 makes the access date optional and suggests it for undated or changing sources. A proceedings paper with a DOI does not need one.
• Capitalizing the month in full. MLA abbreviates months longer than four letters in Works Cited entries: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. May, June and July stay whole.

Quick-reference table

The panel entry in the table is the Style Center's own, and it shows one more pattern: when a session has no title, a description ("Panel discussion") in roman type takes the Title of Source position.