MHRA Style Citation Demonstration
Click cover to enlarge | According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows: McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda, 2018), pp. ix–x, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km0ns.3 This is how standard MHRA style would look. Some of its book series (notably Legenda) allow an alternative citation system called 'author-date', but please talk to your editor before using it. (To see the demonstration for author-date, follow this link.) Let's take this bibliography entry one step at a time: Step 1. We start with the name(s) of the author(s) of the article, inverting the first name into the form 'Forename, Surname'. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’ Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so: McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe Step 6. After the title come any editors or translators. It's 'ed. by', not 'ed by', because although 'ed.' abbreviates 'edited', we regard the 'd' as the second letter of 'edited', not the last: so the abbreviation doesn't contain the last letter, and thus must have a full stop '.' McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith Step 7. Since this is a book, not a journal issue, we have to identify its source, in round brackets. Until 2024, MHRA style required a place of publication - for example, New York or Oxford. This is no longer given except in special circumstances. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith ( Step 8. Now a colon, a space, and the publisher's name. Here that's Legenda because this is the imprint name under which the book is published, even though Legenda is not strictly speaking a company. To decide these things, one must look at the exact wording of the preliminary pages. Our preference is for Legenda books to be cited as 'Legenda', and we word our preliminaries with that aim. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda Step 9. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda, 2018) Step 10. Now the pagination. And we use 'p.' or 'pp.' as appropriate. Number ranges are elided in the last two digits: thus '2234-2265' should be '2234-65', and '102-109' should be '102-09'. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda, 2018), pp. ix–x Step 11. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so. McLelland, Nicola, and Smith, Richard, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda, 2018), pp. ix–x, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km0ns.3 And that's the finished bibliography entry. Note that there's no final full stop. So how about citations in footnotes or endnotes? In standard MHRA style, the first time the work is cited in a note, it should be cited in full. This looks very like a Bibliography entry, but:
Suppose we want to cite a passage on pages 24 to 27: 34 See Nicola McLelland, Richard Smith, ‘Acknowledgments’, in The History of Language Learning and Teaching I: 16th-18th Century Europe, ed. by Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (Legenda, 2018), pp. ix–x, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16km0ns.3, pp. 24-27. But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used: 37 Compare McLelland and Smith, p. 17. |