MHRA Style Citation Demonstration

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

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, ed. by Paul Poplawski (= Yearbook of English Studies, 50.1 (2020)), 116–31

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'.

Davis, Alex

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

Davis, Alex,

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

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’

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

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, 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.

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now

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 '.'

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, ed. by Paul Poplawski

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.

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, ed. by Paul Poplawski (= Yearbook of English Studies, 50.1 (2020))

Step 8. 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'.

Davis, Alex, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, ed. by Paul Poplawski (= Yearbook of English Studies, 50.1 (2020)), 116–31

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 Alex Davis, ‘Murders in the Cathedral and the Maze: The Case-Books of T. S. Eliot, J. J. Connington and Others in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction’, in Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now, ed. by Paul Poplawski (= Yearbook of English Studies, 50.1 (2020)), 116–31, pp. 24-27.

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

37 Compare Davis, p. 17.
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Back-to-Twenties/style-tutorial-8
www.mhra.org.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-43
12219
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:77GD3PP3ZZORB2LULMNRUZ5AEJK3WUF7
<urn:uuid:6f616f5f-19ed-4d75-bb8d-9717517bd760>
2021-10-23T13:49:47Z
173.236.153.16
text/html
sha1:TCXRLH2TWFFMKGG2PGYXT4WMFK65HW33
<urn:uuid:80c44bfe-8229-4a01-b3c1-58547342797d>
http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Back-to-Twenties/style-tutorial-8
response
<urn:uuid:4c53a2dc-f6dd-4a23-9787-deb58f3494e8>
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-10-67-67-75
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/