MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

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

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain (= Austrian Studies, 17 (2010)), pp. 75–97, doi:10.2307/27944910

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'.

Deruchie, Andrew

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

Deruchie, Andrew,

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

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’

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

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, 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.

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music

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 '.'

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain

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.

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain (= Austrian Studies, 17 (2010))

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'.

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain (= Austrian Studies, 17 (2010)), pp. 75–97

Step 9. This contribution has a DOI, so the Fourth Edition Guide (2024) requires us to quote it, like so.

Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain (= Austrian Studies, 17 (2010)), pp. 75–97, doi:10.2307/27944910

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 Andrew Deruchie, ‘Mahler's Farewell or The Earth's Song? Death, Orientalism and "Der Abschied"’, in Words and Music, ed. by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain (= Austrian Studies, 17 (2010)), pp. 75–97, doi:10.2307/27944910, pp. 24-27.

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

37 Compare Deruchie, p. 17.
https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Words-Music/style-tutorial-6
www.mhra.org.uk
CC-MAIN-2024-18
12302
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VQQB6S2CWYPUL5KEXFDNVMF2L2H5UEY5
<urn:uuid:f1b45a19-4d17-4b0a-9974-d7d3e319887e>
2024-04-19T22:47:15Z
173.236.142.58
text/html
sha1:7MRMWB5JAR3EA52BGWEWPHFEA454R645
<urn:uuid:09312e05-023a-40f4-a57c-ac5f13ecc13f>
https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Words-Music/style-tutorial-6
response
<urn:uuid:b14044e7-20da-4935-8ccc-6600084cd1f7>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-234
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-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/