APA and MLA get confused for each other constantly, probably because they're doing the same job — pointing a reader to your source — with almost none of the same mechanics. The in-text citation looks different, the end-of-paper list has a different name and a different structure, and even the punctuation rules don't match. Here's what actually changes, and how to tell which one your assignment wants.
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APA's in-text format is (Author, Year, p. #) — a comma after the author's name, a comma after the year, and "p." for a single page or "pp." for a range, e.g. (Smith, 2020, p. 14). A page number is required for direct quotes and encouraged for paraphrases. Two authors get an ampersand, like (Smith & Jones, 1994); three or more authors get shortened to the first author plus "et al." even on the very first citation, per Purdue OWL's APA guidance.
MLA drops both the comma and the year entirely: (Author page#), like (Smith 14) — no punctuation between the name and the number. That same format is used whether you're quoting directly or paraphrasing, which is a real difference from APA's quote-vs-paraphrase distinction. Two authors: (Best and Marcus 9); three or more: (Franck et al. 327), per Purdue OWL's MLA guidance. If a source has no listed author, both styles fall back to a shortened title instead of a name — APA keeps the year ("Using Citations," 2001), MLA doesn't ("Lighthouse" 12).
APA's list is called "References" — a bold, centered heading, alphabetized by the first author's last name, with author names inverted to initials only (Smith, J. M.). Critically, the structure puts the publication year immediately after the author's name, before the title. Article and webpage titles are in sentence case (only the first word and proper nouns capitalized), while journal and magazine names stay in title case.
MLA's list is called "Works Cited" — a plain heading (not bold), also alphabetized by the first element, but author names are spelled out in full (Burke, Kenneth) rather than reduced to initials. MLA doesn't lock the publication date into a fixed position the way APA does — where the date appears depends on the source type. Titles in MLA use title case throughout, not the sentence-case rule APA applies to articles. Both styles use a 0.5-inch hanging indent for every entry, which is one of the few things they actually share.
As a general pattern rather than a hard rule, APA is the standard in the social sciences — psychology, education, nursing, and related fields, where the publication date matters more to readers evaluating how current a finding is. MLA is the standard in the humanities — literature, languages, and the arts, where the text itself matters more than when it was written. That's the typical split, not a guarantee; always check your assignment sheet or ask your instructor before you format a full reference list in the wrong style.
StudyPilot's citation generator supports both APA (7th edition) and MLA (9th edition) directly, alongside Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver — paste a URL or enter the source details once, and it handles the mechanical differences above (comma placement, name inversion, sentence case vs. title case) for whichever format you pick.
Paste in your source details, pick APA or MLA, and get a properly formatted citation and reference-list entry in seconds.
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