The general MHRA system requires that the first reference to every book, article or other publication in your document should be given in full. Thereafter, references to the same publication may take an abbreviated, but easily identifiable, form (see 1.5, Abbreviated references).
Books
In general, a full reference to a book would appear in a footnote and be presented in the following order, with each piece of information separated from the next by a comma. (It may not be necessary to include all of this information for every book you refer to):
- Author: in the form given on the title page, and with first name preceding surname. When referring to an edition of a primary work which contains the author’s name in the title, as with The Sermons of John Donne, it is not essential to repeat ‘John Donne’ before the title.
- Title: in full and in italics. The initial letters of all principal words should be capitalised.
- Editor / translator, etc.: in the form ‘ed. by’, ‘trans. by’, ‘rev. by’.
- Series: if the book belongs in a series, give the series title and volume number.
- Edition: if other than the first edition, specify ‘2nd edn’, ‘rev. edn’ etc.
- Number of volumes: if the work is in several volumes, state this in the form ‘4 vols’.
- Details of publication: these should be enclosed in round brackets, and take the form (Place of publication: Publisher, Date).
- Volume number: in roman numerals. Where necessary, include the publication date of the volume in brackets after the volume number.
- Page numbers: preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’, unless you have included a volume number.
Here are some examples of first references to books under the MHRA system:
Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. by Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 221
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp.7-12
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. and with introduction, notes and commentary by Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 66
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 41 – 50
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 47 - 83
Chapters or articles in books
Information about a chapter or an article published in a book should be presented in the following order:
- Author
- Article title: in single quotation marks and not italicised.
- ‘in’: preceded by a comma
- Title, editor and publication details of the book as described above
- First and last pages of article: preceded by ‘pp.’
- Page number of reference: in parentheses and preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’
E.g.:
Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“We are the makers of manners”: The Branagh Phenomenon’, in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. by Richard Burt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 83 – 105 (p. 91)
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 1929 - 1932, ed. by Stuart N. Clarke (London: The Hogarth Press, 2009), pp. 306 – 323
Journal articles
A reference to a journal article should be composed as follows:
- Author
- Article title: in single quotation marks and not italicised
- Journal title: in italics
- Series number: in Arabic numerals, not Roman
- Volume number: in Arabic numerals, not Roman
- Year of publication: in parentheses
- First and last pages of article: preceded by ‘pp.’
- Page number of reference: in parentheses and preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’
E.g.:
Brean Hammond, ‘Joseph Addison’s Opera Rosamond: Britishness in the Early Eighteenth Century’, ELH 73.3 (Fall 2006), pp. 601 – 629 (p. 616)
Sylvia Federico, ‘Chaucer and the Matter of Spain’, The Chaucer Review 45.3 (2011), pp. 299 – 320 (pp. 301 – 307)
Online resources
An increasingly large amount of academic information can be found online. When choosing whether to use an online resource, you should use your judgement in determining the quality of the material. Who has created it, and why? Is it appropriate for academic citation?
When referencing an online source, you should keep as closely as possible to the guidelines given above for printed sources. Information should be supplied in the following order:
- Author
- Title
- Title of complete work / resource: this might be the name of the website or an online database, or might be the bibliographic details for an online journal or text
- Publication details: where known, supply the volume and date
- Full web address, URL or DOI : in angle brackets < > . If you can find a stable URL or the DOI listed, this is better than the sometimes very lengthy web address you will have in your browser window. Avoid using TinyURL or similar for academic citation.
- Date of consultation: in square brackets
- Location of reference: for example, the paragraph number or page number where supplied. Include in parentheses.
E.g.:
Rosemary O’Day, ‘Family Galleries: Women and Art in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 71.2 (June 2008), <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2008.71.2.323>, [accessed 14 March 2011] (p.332)
Hans J. Hillebrand, ‘Reformation’ in Encyclopedia of Religion, <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CCX3424502608&v=2.1&u=oxford&it=r&p= GVRL&sw=w>, [accessed 6 November 2010] (p. 7657)
Melvyn New, ‘Sterne, Lawrence (1713 – 1768)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26412>, [accessed 22 May 2011] (para. 12 – 16)
As more resources are accessed online, academic sites and databases regularly provide users with detailed bibliographic information about their content (often located at the very end of an article), which can be very useful when composing your footnotes.
Video Games
References to software should provide the author or designer (if identifiable), the title in italics, the date, and the platform, e.g.:
Emily Short, Galatea (2000), Z-machine.
Id Software, Doom (1993), MS-DOS and subsequently other platforms.
Neil McFarland and Ken Wong for Ustwo, Monument Valley (2014), iOS and Android.
Abbreviated references
After your initial, full reference, you can save space in the rest of your document by using abbreviated references to repeated sources. These abbreviated references can either be included as further footnotes, or can be placed in parentheses in the body of your document. In addition, it is permissible to include all abbreviated references to primary sources in parentheses and all abbreviated references to secondary sources as footnotes if you so choose.
Abbreviated references will normally consist of the author’s name followed by the page
reference (and the volume reference where necessary) as: (Strohm, 91).
Where more than one work by an author has been cited, you may also need to include a short version of the title, in addition to author, volume and page:
MHRA discourages the use of ‘op. cit.’, ‘loc. cit.’ and ‘ibid.’
If you are writing an essay which consistently refers to a set of primary texts by the same author – as in the case of your paper 7 extended essay and numerous tutorial essays – you may like to adopt a system of abbreviation. Following your first (full) citation of each text, you might say at the end of a footnote “All subsequent references are to this edition and
incorporated into the body of the essay”. Thereafter, you can place page numbers in parentheses within the text. If there is any ambiguity as to which primary text you are referring to, include a short title.
Alternatively, if you are consistently referring to a set of original primary sources such as manuscripts, or again, you are relying on a particular group of texts which you need to refer to repeatedly in your work, you may include a section in your bibliography that shows the abbreviations you will use for each source. For example, if you were writing an essay about Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and you were using the Michael Kiernan edition cited above as your primary text, you might enter it into your list of abbreviations as follows:
|
AL
|
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. and with
introduction, notes and commentary by Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
|
You would then label all references to the text with AL and the page number (again, you can do this in parentheses or in footnotes).
MHRA (author – date system)
This system can save you space when you are working to a word limit. Instead of including full references in the document, all source information is contained in a comprehensive bibliography at the end of your document. Such a bibliography would not be included in any word counts.
Your bibliography should be arranged in alphabetical order by author surname, and multiple works by one author should be arranged by date of publication. If two or more works by the same author share a publication date, you should distinguish between them by marking them e.g. ‘1995a’ and ‘1995b’.
When you need to make a reference in your document, you should include it in the body of the text in parentheses. It should give the author’s surname, the date of publication and the page reference, in the following form: (Colclough, 2001: 105). If your text already mentions the author’s name, as in “Colclough suggests that...”, you may omit the name from the reference in parentheses.
