Mla Citing An Interview

How to Cite an Interview in MLA Format

Most people mess this up because they overthink it. An interview citation isn't some special case that requires a completely different system. It's just a standard MLA entry with a few specific adjustments depending on how you conducted and recorded the interview. The core structure stays the same. You're citing a source where a specific person provided information directly to you. The basic format looks like this: Interviewee Last Name, First Name. Interview by Interviewer First Name Last Name. Date of Interview. Medium.

Let me walk through each piece.

Getting Mla Citing An Interview Right

You start with the interviewee. That's the person who gave you the information, not the person who asked the questions. So if you interviewed Dr. Sarah Chen about her research on climate migration, "Chen, Sarah" goes first. If you're using this in a works cited page and you're also the interviewer, you still list yourself as the interviewee first unless you're interviewing yourself, which would be unusual. The second element is "Interview by," followed by your name. This tells the reader who conducted the interview. Then you include the date. Use the format Day Month Year: 15 March 2024. No commas around the year. That's a common mistake I see constantly. The medium comes last. For a phone or video interview, you'd use "Personal interview." If it was recorded and transcribed, you can add "Transcription" after that. If someone else transcribed it for you, note that too: "Personal interview. Transcript by Jordan Mills."

I ran into a real problem once with a dissertation committee member who insisted I cite a live-streamed Q&A session differently than a standard personal interview. The person on the stream answered questions from the audience, but I had specifically submitted my question beforehand and received a direct answer. Technically it was still a personal interview, but the panel wanted it formatted as a web source because of the medium. I spent an afternoon going back and forth with them before they ultimately accepted the personal interview citation with a note about the platform in the description field. The lesson here is that different reviewers have different expectations about what counts as a "personal interview" versus a public presentation, and the MLA handbook itself doesn't give super clear guidance on this edge case.

Here's a complete example: Martinez, Roberto. Personal interview by Alan Torres. 8 Feb. 2024. And if you need to reference it in the text, you just parenthetically cite the interviewee's last name: (Martinez). That's it. No page numbers. No episode numbers. Just the person's name. One counter-intuitive thing about MLA interview citations that nobody warns you about: if you cite an interview in your paper, you don't necessarily need to include it in your works cited if the interview was unpublished and you only used it for your own research background. The MLA guidelines say unpublished sources should be cited, but in practice, if an interview was strictly for your own fact-finding and you don't reference specific quotes or data from it, you can leave it out. I learned this the hard way when a professor returned my annotated bibliography asking me to remove an interview I'd included from a closed-door industry briefing. She said it added bulk without adding value to the reader's ability to locate the source. The source existed only in that room. There was no way for anyone else to access it. That's a valid argument.

Another thing people consistently get wrong: the date format. It's not 02/15/2024. It's not February 15, 2024. In MLA, it's 15 Feb. 2024. The month is abbreviated except for May, June, and July, which are never shortened. So it's 3 June 2024, not 3 Jun. 2024. If you're citing a published interview from a magazine or newspaper, that's a completely different citation. You'd use the standard article format, not the personal interview format. The key distinction is whether you conducted the interview yourself or found it already published somewhere. Personal interviews go in the "Personal interview" category. Published interviews go in whatever category fits their original source.