MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows:

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw (= Slavonic and East European Review, 93.1 (2015)), doi:

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'.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B.

Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B.,

Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’

Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so:

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in

Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title. This is actually a journal issue, but it's a themed number with a title, so we give that title here just as if it were a book.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia

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 '.'

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw

Step 7. We gave this a title as if it were a book, but we need to give the equivalent journal citation as well: note the '=' sign.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw (= Slavonic and East European Review, 93.1 (2015))

Step 8. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so.

Breyfogle, Nicholas B., ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw (= Slavonic and East European Review, 93.1 (2015)), doi:

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:

  • The author's name doesn't always come first: only for monographs. For collections and editions, the title comes first.
  • Even if the author's name does come first, it's back to being the right way round, so it's Forename Surname, not Surname, Forename;
  • Unlike Bibliography entries, notes are punctuated as sentences, and usually end in full stops.

Suppose we want to cite a passage on pages 24 to 27:

34 See Nicholas B. Breyfogle, ‘At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism’, in Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw (= Slavonic and East European Review, 93.1 (2015)), doi:, pp. 24-27.

But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used:

37 Compare Breyfogle, p. 17.