MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

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

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007), 49–56 <http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-2> [accessed 27 October 2021]

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'.

Mével, Pierre-Alexis

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

Mével, Pierre-Alexis,

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

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’

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

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in

Step 5. Next we identify where the article is to be found, using italics, not quotation marks, for the volume title.

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2

Step 6. Since this is a journal, no need for place of publication or publisher, only the year.

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007)

Step 7. Now the pagination. This is a journal, so we don't use 'p.' or 'pp.'. Number ranges are elided in the last two digits: thus '2234-2265' should be '2234-65', and '102-109' should be '102-09'.

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007), 49–56

Step 8. This is an electronic publication, so we give the URL. Note the angle brackets!

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007), 49–56 <http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-2>

Step 9. Electronic publications cited by URL rather than DOI must give an access date. For this demonstration, it's today. Note the format, Day Month Year, with the Month spelled out in full.

Mével, Pierre-Alexis, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007), 49–56 <http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-2> [accessed 27 October 2021]

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 Pierre-Alexis Mével, ‘The Translation of Identity: Subtitling the Vernacular of the French cité’, in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 2 (2007), 49–56 <http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/wph-2> [accessed 27 October 2021], pp. 24-27.

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

37 Compare Mével, p. 17.
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Working-Papers-in-Humanities-2/style-tutorial-4
www.mhra.org.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-43
11755
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ABECXXXG4H3VEMS2SW3APNWVDMIDU4GL
<urn:uuid:b8953c7e-cd84-4658-b4d3-da6d9dfe01a3>
2021-10-27T17:11:03Z
173.236.153.16
text/html
sha1:YR53TK6JMUORZOXAZATAFSWZFUYHFSTR
<urn:uuid:cac82aa1-7798-4f27-9a95-7366299286b4>
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Working-Papers-in-Humanities-2/style-tutorial-4
response
<urn:uuid:431e877e-941a-4e9e-bf41-9ff84528cc51>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-231
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/