What Is MHRA Referencing?

If you’re studying in the humanities, you may need to use MHRA referencing at some point. But what exactly is the MHRA system? And how does it work?

In this post, we set out the basics. And don’t forget to check our other posts on MHRA referencing if you want to find out about different source types.

What Is MHRA Referencing?

The Modern Humanities Research Association is an organisation that promotes study of the humanities, particularly literature and languages. It is best known for producing the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses.

MHRA referencing is a citation system drawn from this guide. You can download the third edition of the MHRA Style Guide as a PDF for free. But since it’s quite a big book, we’ll try to summarise the key points here.

Citing Sources

When people refer to MHRA referencing, they usually mean the footnote and bibliography version, where sources are cited in footnotes. These are indicated using superscript numbers in the text:

Usually at the end of the sentence, like this.¹

The first citation of a source should include full publication information. For a book, this means:

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

You can then shorten further citations of the same source to save space. The MHRA style guide recommends using the ‘shortest intelligible form’ for this, usually just the author’s surname and a page number (although you should check whether your university has other rules).

There is also an author–date version of MHRA referencing set out in the style guide, but this is much less common in practice.

The Bibliography

All cited sources should be listed in a bibliography at the end of your document. Bibliography entries are similar to the first footnote citation for a source, but the author’s surname is given first, and the page number(s) and final punctuation are left out.

A book, for example, would be listed like this:

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

In addition, you should format the bibliography using these rules:

• List sources alphabetically by author surname.
• List anonymous works by title (ignoring articles for alphabetical order).
• If citing more than one work by the same author, sort them alphabetically by title. You will also need to replace the author’s name(s) with two em dashes for each entry after the first.
• Use italics for titles of longer works (e.g. books).
• Use inverted commas for shorter works (e.g. journal articles).
• You can abbreviate the titles of frequently cited journals, but you must give the full titles in a list of abbreviations earlier in your work.

Follow these rules and you should end up with a well formatted MHRA bibliography. Good luck!