MLA International Bibliography

MLA citations feature subject terms taken from the MLA Thesaurus, a controlled vocabulary of over 49,000 topical terms and 327,000 names. New subjects and names (descriptors) are regularly added to reflect the state of current scholarship in literature, language, folklore, and linguistics.

Users should note that subject indexing in the bibliography is considerably richer for records from 1981 onwards. Before 1981, MLA bibliographers used a more simplified approach to classification, generally only noting the main concept of each article; for example, 'American Literature -- 1800–1899 -- Hawthorne, Nathaniel', or 'language -- bilingualism' or 'ethnomusicology -- musical instruments'. In 1981, a contextual indexing and faceted taxonomic access system (CIFT) was adopted, whereby which each item is assigned an order sequence of subject descriptors.

Subject descriptors are usually specific terms; appropriate cross-references are provided to similar or related terms in the index. Descriptors define the explicit content: for example, authors are not identified as belonging to groups unless their group identification is treated within the indexed document, and methodological approaches are specified only when they are discussed or clearly applied. Finally, descriptors are assigned for an item if, and only if, users seeking information on the topic indicated by a descriptor would be likely to want to retrieve the item.

Read more about descriptors and indexing on the MLA website.

The role indicators display in the Subject Heading field and describe relationships between descriptors. The role indicators do not appear in the browsable indexes (Look Ups).

• influence on
• theories of
• relationship to
• role in/of
• treatment of
• compared to
• application in/of
• applied to
• compared to
• discusses
• use of
• theories of
• sources in/for
• for audience
• treatment in/of etc

MLA offers several Look ups or browsable indexes, so you can easily find spelling or format variations of, for example, an author's name or a journal title. You can find 13 Look up links on the advanced search page and they are available for the following searchable fields: authors as subject, author's works,  languages of publication,subject headings (all), publication titles, folklore topic, genre, linguistics topic, literary influence, literary source, literary theme, literature topic and national literature.There are also 7 Look up links on the Directory of periodicals page: Publication titles, subject headings (all), languages, sposoring organization, publisher, country and editor.

For a description of these fields, please see the searchable fields table to the right. 

Note: Look ups are also available from the Command Line search (through the Look up terms link).

To use and locate a Look up or browsable index, select the field from the advanced search pull-down menu. If a Look up is available, under the search row you will see a link to the Look up. Other Look ups and browsable indexes will be listed in the Limit To section of the advanced search page.

Select the Look up link and then you will see a browsable and alphabetical index for that field. There are some indexes that will not display an alphabetical list before searching for the term, rather you will have to enter a term first, and then the alphabetical list of matches will display.

Once you locate the index term that you would like to add to your search, mark the item, and then click the Add to search button. The index term will now appear in the advanced search form along with the appropriate pull-down menu selection.