The Modern Language Association changed their citation format rules in the MLA Handbook, 7th edition, published in March, 2009.
Gale is working toward upgrading all Gale products currently offering MLA 6 citations to MLA 7 citation format.
The most visible changes found in MLA 7 include:
• No more underlining — publication titles and the names of online products accessed are now italicized
• No more URLs — MLA no longer requires URLs, but encourages writers to provide a URL if the citation information does not easily lead readers to the source
• Continuous pagination — this is no longer an issue for scholarly journal citations; both volume and issue numbers are required, regardless of pagination
• Publication medium — since all documents are accessed from an online Gale resource, the citation will always include the medium “Web.” In addition, MLA has eliminated the requirement to include the name of the service (“Gale”) and the name of the subscribing institution
• New abbreviations — when certain metadata is missing, such as publisher or page numbers, there are suggested abbreviations to denote that fact
