Is my MLA citation format causing my draft rejection?

Yes, your MLA citation format is almost certainly the culprit behind your draft's rejection, primarily because MLA is rarely the standard style used in biomedical engineering. In the sciences, professors typically expect styles like APA, IEEE, or AMA, which prioritize publication dates and numerical systems over the author-page format of MLA. When a professor says your citations are all wrong, they might not just mean you misplaced a period or italicized the wrong title; they might mean you used an entirely inappropriate style manual for the discipline. If your syllabus specifically mandated MLA, then you likely tripped over the complex rules governing multiple authors or online database sources, which are common in engineering papers. Either way, your first step is to clarify the expected style guide with your instructor immediately, as rewriting twelve pages of citations in the wrong format a second time would be devastating with only two weeks left. If your professor confirms that MLA is indeed required, the most common pitfall for engineering students is handling sources with three or more authors. In MLA, you must use the first author's name followed by et al. in both your in-text citations and your Works Cited page, whereas older styles or other guides might list up to ten authors. Another frequent misstep is how you cite patents, conference proceedings, or technical reports, which are staples of a biomedical draft. Students often try to format these like standard book chapters or website articles, leading to missing container titles or misplaced publisher information. For example, if you cited a patent for a novel cardiovascular stent, you might have treated the patent office as a website publisher rather than listing the patent number and the inventor as the primary author. This confusion disrupts the container system that MLA relies on, making your sources difficult for your professor to verify. To fix this systematically without panicking, you need to audit your draft from the back to the front. Start by building a clean Works Cited page first, because your in-text citations are entirely dependent on the very first word of each entry on that bibliography page. If you are citing a journal article from an online database, remember that MLA requires both the journal container and the database container, complete with a DOI or stable URL. Once your bibliography is perfect, go through your text sentence by sentence to ensure your parenthetical citations match those exact lead words, usually the author's last name, along with the specific page number if you are quoting or paraphrasing a specific section. Do not rely solely on automated citation generators, as they frequently miscategorize technical documents and patents, leading to the exact formatting errors that trigger a rejection. Given your tight two-week window, your most practical next step is to visit your campus writing center or schedule a brief office-hours meeting with your professor to show them a single, corrected page of your draft. Bring your syllabus and a copy of the specific style guide they prefer so you can verify you are on the right track before revising all twelve pages. If you feel overwhelmed by the technical formatting, a university reference librarian is an excellent, underutilized resource who can look at your specific biomedical sources and help you map them to the correct citation templates.