MHRA Style Citation Demonstration
Click cover to enlarge | According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows: Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor (= Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2006)), pp. 1–16, doi:10.2307/20479239 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'. Watson, J. R. Step 2. This is regular MHRA style, so the name's followed by a comma. Watson, J. R., Step 3. Now we add the title, in single inverted commas. Any single quotation marks already in the title must be converted to doubles. Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’ Step 4. We have to say where this comes from, so: Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, 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. Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature 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 '.' Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor 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. Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor (= Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2006)) Step 8. Now the pagination. And we use 'p.' or 'pp.' as appropriate. Journal articles used to omit 'pp.' in MHRA Style, but the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) removes this exception, so now page ranges in journals are treated just the same as in books. Number ranges are elided in the last two digits: thus '2234-2265' should be '2234-65', and '102-109' should be '102-09'. Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor (= Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2006)), pp. 1–16 Step 9. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so. Watson, J. R., ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor (= Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2006)), pp. 1–16, doi:10.2307/20479239 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 J. R. Watson, ‘Ancient or Modern, "Ancient and Modern": The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century’, in Victorian Literature, ed. by John Batchelor (= Yearbook of English Studies, 36.2 (2006)), pp. 1–16, doi:10.2307/20479239, pp. 24-27. But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used: 37 Compare Watson, p. 17. |