Introducing MHRA Referencing
MHRA referencing is set out in The MHRA Style Guide (3rd Edition). Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association, this guide is mostly used in the humanities, especially in the UK. And if you’re using MHRA footnotes in your written work, you’ll want a proofreader who knows this system well. So it’s a good thing you found us!
MHRA Proofreading Services
Not yet confident you’ve mastered MHRA? Then why not let our referencing experts help out? With our proofreading services, you can select this referencing system when you upload a document and we’ll assign a specialist MHRA editor to check your work.
How To Select
MHRA Referencing
When you upload a document to our system, we’ll ask you to brief your editor. As part of this, you can select ‘MHRA’ from the dropdown Referencing Style menu.
Although rarely used, the MHRA Style Guide also includes rules for author–date citations. If you’re using this version of MHRA, or if you have any other instructions for your editor, let us know via the comment box while uploading your document.
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Footnote Citations In MHRA Referencing
The first time you cite a source in MHRA referencing, you should give full publication information in a footnote. You indicate this with a superscript number in the text:
History is often said to repeat itself.¹
This number will match the number of the footnote at the bottom of the page. The information in the footnote itself should clearly identify the text cited, including page numbers. For instance, we would cite a book as follows:
¹ Alex Gifford, A Little Bit of History Repeating: Patterns in Historiographical Analysis (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 1997), p. 24.
This citation includes the author’s name, the title, publication details, and the page cited. We would then shorten this to the author’s surname and a page number for repeat citations (plus an abbreviated title if we were citing more than one source by the same author). For more information on MHRA referencing, see our blog. You can also download the full MHRA Style Guide (3rd Edition) as a free PDF from the MHRA website.
MHRA Bibliographies
Most universities will ask you to provide a bibliography at the end of your document as well as citing sources in footnotes. And in MHRA referencing, this means:
- Listing every source you cite with full publication information
- Sorting sources alphabetically by author surname
- Italicising titles of longer works (e.g. books)
- Placing titles of shorter works (e.g. journal articles) within inverted commas
- Using a hanging indent for each line after the first in each entry
Entries in an MHRA bibliography are similar to the first citation for each source. However, you will need to invert the first listed author’s names (i.e. list them surname first). And bibliography entries do not need a page number or end punctuation. For instance, we would list the book cited in the example footnote above as follows:
Gifford, Alex, A Little Bit of History Repeating: Patterns in Historiographical Analysis (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 1997)
Referencing Styles And Systems
Our expert editors can work with a range of referencing styles, including:
We can work with other referencing styles on request, too. Just let us know which system you’re using when you upload your work, and we’ll tailor our service accordingly. For more information on legal referencing styles, such as OSCOLA and AGLC, see our dedicated legal referencing page.
