MHRA Referencing – How to Cite a Book

MHRA referencing is a citation style set out by the Modern Humanities Research Association. It is commonly used in humanities subjects, especially English language and literature.

So if you’re writing an essay and your university uses MHRA referencing, knowing how to cite a book will be essential. In this blogpost, we explain how this is done.

Footnote Citations

MHRA uses footnote citations, indicated using superscript numbers in the main text:

Footnotes typically appear after final punctuation, like this.¹

You then need to give full information for the source in a footnote at the bottom of the page. For a book, use the following format:

^n. Author Name(s), Title (Place of Publication: Publisher, Year), page number.

In practice, a footnote citation would look something like this:

^1. Simone Weil, Waiting on God (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1951), p. 65.

The page number should indicate the specific part of the book cited, helping your reader find the relevant passage.

Repeat Citations in MHRA

There’s no need to repeat the full source information in footnotes if you cite the same book more than once. Instead, simply give the author’s surname and a page number:

^1. Simone Weil, Waiting on God (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1951), p. 65.
^2. Weil, p. 100.

If you cite more than one book by the same author, give a shortened version of the title in the citation as well:

^1. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge, 1957), p. 84.
^2. Simone Weil, Waiting on God (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1951), pp. 59-60.
^3. Weil, Intimations of Christianity, p. 112.

Books in an MHRA Bibliography

Source information is also given in a bibliography at the end of your document.

With MHRA referencing, you should include every source you used during your research in the bibliography, even if you did not cite them in the finished essay. Sources should be listed alphabetically by author surname.

The format to use for a book is:

Surname, First Name, Title (Place of Publication: Publisher, Year)

For example, the book Waiting on God would appear in an MHRA bibliography as:

Weil, Simone, Waiting on God (Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1951)

Note that, unlike in footnotes, you do not have to give page numbers or use end punctuation here.