Coming to MLA from APA
The in-text citation is where the two styles part company most visibly. APA wants the year, so you write (Sharma, 2021). MLA 9 wants the location instead, so the same source becomes (Sharma 47) — no comma, no year, and a page number when you are quoting from one. Markers notice this immediately.
The second difference is capitalisation. APA 7 uses sentence case for article titles, so only the first word and proper nouns are capitalised. MLA 9 uses title case: every principal word takes a capital, while articles, short prepositions and conjunctions stay lower case unless they open the title or follow a colon.
Author lists diverge too. APA 7 names up to twenty authors in the reference list; MLA 9 names the first and switches to et al. from three onwards. A four-author paper that runs to a full line in APA is reduced to one surname and et al. in MLA, and generators that handle two authors then fail at three are common.
Containers, volume numbers and accessed dates
MLA 9 thinks in containers. The work you are citing sits inside something larger: an essay inside an anthology, an article inside a journal, a page inside a website. The smaller title takes quotation marks and the container is italicised, which is why a journal article shows its own title in quotes and the journal name in italics.
Volume and issue numbers are written out in lower case as vol. 12, no. 3, rather than the italic-and-brackets form APA uses, and a page range follows after pp. The order of the core elements is fixed: author, title, container, volume, issue, publisher, date, location.
Web sources take an accessed date because pages change. MLA 9 treats it as optional, but most Indian university handbooks still ask for it and it costs nothing to include: Accessed 14 Mar. 2026, day first with the month abbreviated. Use the date you actually read the page, not the date you write the essay.
What you still have to check
The formatting here is rule-based, not generated. It applies MLA 9 to what you type, so the output is only as good as the input: a surname entered in the given-name field ends up inverted, and a title typed in capitals is title-cased into something odd. Read the entry once before it goes in.
Some decisions are editorial and no tool can make them. Whether an organisation counts as the author or the publisher, how to treat a translated title, what to do when a web page names no author at all — MLA gives principles rather than a lookup table, and your department's handbook may have a house rule that overrides the general one.
Two things are left to your word processor: alphabetising the finished list by the first element of each entry, and applying the hanging indent of 1.27 cm that MLA expects. Both are quick, and both are marked. Paste the entries in, sort them, then set the indent once for the whole list.