MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

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

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6 (Legenda, 2001)

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. The entry begins with the author(s) or editor(s) of the volume, with the first name inverted into Surname, Forename. This is because a Bibliography is a list in surname order, so we need a surname up front.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie

Step 2. If somebody has a role other than that of author, it goes next, in brackets. One editor becomes '(ed.)', two or more '(eds)'. (Remember: 'ed.' stands for 'editor', not 'edited', so the full stop must be used, because 'd' is not its last letter.)

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.)

Step 3. Now a comma, not a full stop:

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.),

Step 4. Here we have the book's title, in italics, not quotation marks.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski

Step 5. 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.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6

Step 6. 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.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6 (

Step 7. 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.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6 (Legenda

Step 8. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part.

Czerniawski, Adam, and with an introduction by Donald Davie (trans.), Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6 (Legenda, 2001)

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 Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, trans. by Adam Czerniawski and with an introduction by Donald Davie, Studies In Comparative Literature, 6 (Legenda, 2001), pp. 24-27.

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

37 Compare Czerniawski and Davie, p. 17.