MHRA Style Citation Demonstration
Click cover to enlarge | According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows: Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda, 2019), pp. 89–102, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16kkzj9.11 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'. Cottini, Luca Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma. Cottini, Luca, Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’ Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so: Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative 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 '.' Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza Step 7. This book belongs to a series, so we'll name that. If the series is numbered, we give the number, too. No italics, no quotation marks in the series name. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 Step 8. 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. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 ( Step 9. 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. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda Step 10. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda, 2019) Step 11. 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'. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda, 2019), pp. 89–102 Step 12. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so. Cottini, Luca, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda, 2019), pp. 89–102, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16kkzj9.11 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 Luca Cottini, ‘Chapter 6 Buffalo Bill and the Italian Myth of the American West’, in Italy and the USA: Cultural Change Through Language and Narrative, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Alessandro Carlucci and Matthew Reza, Italian Perspectives, 44 (Legenda, 2019), pp. 89–102, doi:10.2307/j.ctv16kkzj9.11, pp. 24-27. But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used: 37 Compare Cottini, p. 17. |