MLA vs. APA, explained without the headache

The one-sentence version

MLA is for the humanities (English, history, philosophy); APA is for the social sciences (psychology, sociology, education). If the assignment doesn't say, ask — it's a thirty-second question that saves an hour of reformatting.

The real difference

APA cares about when something was published, because in the sciences recency matters — so the year sits right up front: (Park, 2025). MLA cares about where in the text you found it, because in the humanities the passage matters — so you cite the page: (Park 112). Almost every formatting difference follows from that one distinction.

The five fields that cover almost everything

Capture these five for every source as you go and any citation generator — or a patient hour with the style guide — can produce the works-cited page. The students who suffer at midnight are the ones re-hunting URLs, not the ones formatting commas.

• Author (who wrote it)
• Title (of the article or page, and of the larger work)
• Publisher or journal name
• Date published
• Where you got it (URL or DOI, plus access date for web sources)

That's why the source library here stores author, title, date, and URL on every source card: collect the fields when you find the source, and the bibliography becomes a chore instead of a crisis.