By guzg · October 6, 2026 · 7 min read

I run a site with a citation generator on it, which means I can see the search terms people type before they find it. One pattern stood out immediately.

A lot of people search for "website work cited", in the singular. Others type "website works cited". Both groups are looking for the same thing, and both are slightly off, because the list has three different names depending on which citation style you're using, and nobody explains that upfront.

That's the first mistake on this list. Here are the rest, ordered roughly by how often I see them.

1. Calling the reference list the wrong name

Each style uses its own term, and they're not interchangeable:

Using the wrong heading is an easy mark to lose, and it's the kind of thing a marker notices immediately because it's the first word on the page.

2. Confusing italics with quotation marks

The rule, once you see it, is consistent across all three styles: the container is italicised, the thing inside it goes in quotation marks.

So a journal article gets its title in quotes and the journal name in italics. A chapter gets quotes, the book it lives in gets italics. A web page gets quotes, the website gets italics.

The exception that trips people up: whole standalone works. A book title, a film title, and a whole website's name are all italicised on their own, because there's no larger container.

3. Not knowing what to do with a missing author

Each style handles this differently, and applying the wrong rule is common.

• MLA: skip the author and start with the title.
• APA: move the title to the author position, then the date.
• Chicago: start with the title, and note that a bibliography entry alphabetised by title is normal.

What you should never do is write "Anonymous" or "n.a." unless the source itself is actually credited that way.

4. Writing "n.d." in MLA

APA uses "n.d." when there's no date. MLA does not. MLA's rule is to omit the date element entirely if it isn't available.

This is one of the most frequent cross-style errors I see, because people learn one style's convention and apply it to all of them.

5. Getting the YouTube author wrong

Citing a YouTube video is one of the most-searched citation questions, and the confusion is nearly always about authorship.

The author is the uploader, meaning the channel or account name, not the person speaking in the video. So a TED talk is cited under "TED" unless a specific speaker is formally credited as the creator.

APA also requires the [Video] descriptor in square brackets after the title, which is easy to forget and easy to spot.

6. Forgetting the hanging indent

Every line after the first one in each entry should be indented half an inch.

It's a formatting detail rather than a content one, but it's the fastest visual check a marker can run: a reference list without hanging indents looks unfinished regardless of how correct the entries are.

In Word it's under Paragraph, then Special, then Hanging. It takes about ten seconds for the whole list.

7. Missing the date format difference

The three styles place and format dates differently, and mixing them up is easy when you're working across subjects.

Note that MLA puts the day before the month and does not abbreviate. APA puts the year first and does abbreviate the month.

8. Citing where you found it, not where it came from

If you read about a study in a news article, the citation belongs to the study, not the news article. Same for a paper you found through Google Scholar, or a quote you read in a textbook.

Cite the original source. If you genuinely can't access it, that's when you use the secondary citation form (in APA, "as cited in"), which signals clearly that you didn't read the original.

9. Treating all three styles as variations of one

The deeper issue behind half the mistakes above: APA, MLA and Chicago aren't dialects of a single system. They were built for different disciplines with different priorities.

APA cares about recency, so the date sits up front. MLA cares about authorship and specific pages, so full names and page numbers matter. Chicago cares about being readable in a footnote, so it's more verbose. Once you know what each one is optimising for, the rules stop feeling arbitrary.

10. Guessing at a source type the generator doesn't cover

Most citation tools handle the common cases: book, journal article, website. The moment you need a podcast episode, a government report, or a lecture you attended, they fall over, and people improvise.

My advice for those cases: find the closest equivalent in the style guide's own list of source types and follow its pattern, rather than inventing a format. A marker is far more forgiving of "used the report format for a government document" than of a citation that follows no recognisable structure.

What the search data suggests

The searches that brought people here cluster tightly: works cited lists, MLA website format, YouTube in APA, and Chicago generators. Almost none of them are about obscure rules. They're about the basics, phrased in several different ways because the terminology isn't consistent across the guides people are reading.

That's a solvable problem, and it's mostly solved by knowing which style you're writing in before you start, rather than partway through.

If you want the formatting handled, the citation generator covers APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago 17 for books, websites, journal articles and videos. It won't decide which style your professor wants, but it will apply the one you pick consistently.