MHRA referencing: footnotes, bibliography, and worked examples

MHRA referencing is the house style of the Modern Humanities Research Association, and if your department has asked for it you are probably writing in English literature, modern languages, history, or another humanities field at a UK university. It is a footnote style: the full reference appears at the bottom of the page the first time you cite a source, so your reader never has to flip to the back to see what you are quoting.

That design is why humanities departments like it, and why it punishes sloppiness. Your footnotes are on display on every page, directly under the argument they support. An examiner does not need to hunt for referencing errors in an MHRA thesis; they are printed at the bottom of the page being read.

This guide covers first references, short forms for repeat citations, how the bibliography differs from the footnotes, worked examples for the common source types, the errors that get flagged, and how to generate MHRA references automatically.

When MHRA referencing is required

MHRA is standard in UK humanities departments and in journals published by or aligned with the association, which covers much of literary studies and modern languages publishing. Some history departments use it; others prefer Chicago or a local variant, so never assume. Postgraduate handbooks sometimes rename it 'departmental style' while reproducing MHRA rules, so compare the examples rather than trusting the label.

Editions matter. The MHRA Style Guide has been through several editions, and recent ones added an author-date option alongside the traditional notes style. Check which edition your department follows and whether it expects footnotes, endnotes, or the author-date variant before you format a single reference.

If you are weighing MHRA against other footnote systems, the nearest cousin is Chicago's notes and bibliography style. The mechanics are similar; the details are not. Single versus double quotation marks, 'ed. by' versus 'ed.', angle brackets around web addresses: mixing the two styles is one of the fastest ways to fail a formatting check.

MHRA footnotes: the first, full reference

In the text, a superscript number goes after the punctuation of the sentence or clause it supports. The matching footnote gives the full reference the first time a source appears, and every note ends with a full stop.

A first reference to a book looks like this: Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 214. Author in natural order, title in italics, publication details in parentheses in the order city, publisher, year, then the page you are citing.

The conventions to internalise: 'p.' and 'pp.' for page references, 'ed. by' rather than 'ed.' for editors, 'trans. by' for translators, single quotation marks around article and chapter titles, and italics for book and journal titles. These small choices are the fingerprint of MHRA; change them and the style stops being MHRA.

Two or three authors are joined with 'and', all in natural order. For four or more, MHRA prefers the first author followed by 'and others' rather than the Latin 'et al.'. Organisational authors are simply given as the organisation's name.

Short form footnotes for repeat citations, and what to do about ibid.

Only the first citation gets the full treatment. After that, use the shortest unambiguous form, usually the author's surname, a short title, and the page: Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 310. If you cite only one work by an author, surname and page can be enough, but the short title keeps things unambiguous when a second work by the same author appears later in the thesis.

On ibid.: recent MHRA guidance moves away from Latin abbreviations, and the short form is always acceptable. Ibid. chains are also fragile. Move one paragraph during revision and an ibid. that pointed at the right note now points at the wrong one. If your department's guide permits ibid., restrict it to the note immediately preceding; if you want the safe habit, use short forms everywhere.

Footnotes in MHRA can also carry brief substantive asides, but use them sparingly. An examiner reads every note, and a thesis whose argument leaks into the footnotes reads as unfinished. Citation notes should do their job and stop.

How the MHRA bibliography differs from your footnotes

The bibliography is not a paste of your first footnotes. Entries change in specific ways:

• The first author's name is inverted for alphabetical sorting: Lee, Hermione. Co-authors after the first stay in natural order.
• Page references to the passage you cited disappear; chapters and articles keep their full page range only.
• Entries do not end with a full stop, unlike footnotes.
• The list is ordered alphabetically by surname, and literary theses often divide it into primary and secondary sources.

Ordering the bibliography

Alphabetise strictly by surname. Multiple works by the same author are grouped together under that name, anonymous works file under their title, and if your department wants primary and secondary sources separated, each list is alphabetised independently. The bibliography is the first page many examiners turn to, because it shows the range of your reading in one glance; make it easy to scan.

Names with particles such as de, van, or von follow the bearer's own usage: alphabetise accordingly and keep the same form everywhere the name appears, in footnotes and bibliography alike.

Worked examples: book, chapter, journal article, thesis, and website

The footnote 'Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 214.' becomes the bibliography entry 'Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996)'. Same information, different job. Here are the other patterns you will need, shown as first footnotes.

Book chapter: Maria Alvarez, 'Reading the Margins', in Manuscript Cultures of Early Modern Europe, ed. by James Holt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 51-72 (p. 55). The chapter's full span comes first, then the specific page in parentheses.

Journal article: Sarah Whitfield, 'Staging Silence in Beckett's Late Plays', Modern Language Review, 105 (2010), 345-62 (p. 350). Note the shape: volume number without 'vol.', year in parentheses, the article's full page range with MHRA's elided digits (345-62, not 345-362), then the cited page in parentheses. There is no 'pp.' before a journal article's page range.

Unpublished thesis: Robert Ellis, 'The Gothic Revival in Provincial England' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 2018), p. 88.

Website: Author or Organisation, 'Page Title' <URL> [accessed 14 March 2026]. MHRA wraps the address in angle brackets and puts the accessed date in square brackets; replace URL with the full address.

Editions and reprints: give the edition after the title when it is not the first, for example 2nd edn, and cite the printing you actually used. Translations name the translator: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Oliver Ready (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 101.

Bibliography versions follow the rules above: invert the first author, drop cited pages, keep chapter and article ranges, and leave off the final full stop.

MHRA for literary sources: plays, poems, and editions

Literary theses cite primary texts constantly, and MHRA has conventions to keep those citations short. After a first full footnote identifying the edition you are using, later references to a canonical text can move into the body of the essay in parentheses: act, scene, and line for plays, book and line for long poems, chapter for novels. State once, in that first note, that further references are given in the text.

The edition matters more than it looks. Quotations must match the edition you cited, line numbering differs between editions of the same play, and an examiner who checks one quotation against your named edition will check more if the first one fails. Pick a scholarly edition early and stay with it.

Common MHRA errors examiners notice

MHRA errors cluster in predictable places:

• Double quotation marks around titles where MHRA wants single.
• 'ed.' instead of 'ed. by', and 'trans.' instead of 'trans. by'.
• 'p.' surviving into the bibliography, or cited pages listed where only full ranges belong.
• Footnote numbers placed before punctuation instead of after.
• 'pp.' added before journal article page ranges, which MHRA omits.
• Missing accessed dates or missing angle brackets on web sources.
• Ibid. chains broken by revision, so notes point at the wrong source.

Generate MHRA references automatically

None of those errors is fatal alone. In bulk they signal carelessness, and in a viva that suspicion spreads from your footnotes to your argument. The cure is to stop hand-typing the punctuation at all.

For one-off references, CiteDash's free MHRA citation generator formats books, articles, chapters, and websites in the patterns above.

For a full thesis, the Reference Manager is the durable fix. Every citation in CiteDash is a database object that resolves to a real paper, never free text, and your bibliography is formatted in MHRA or any of 12 supported styles, so if a journal later asks for the same material in Harvard the switch is a setting rather than a rewrite. You can also import an existing Zotero, Mendeley, or BibTeX library rather than re-entering anything.

Verify your sources before the viva

Formatting is the visible half of referencing. The invisible half is whether the reference is real, current, and says what you claim it says. Examiners spot-check footnotes, and a citation that does not support the sentence above it does more damage than any punctuation slip.

CiteDash grounds AI-assisted claims in the full-text PDFs it holds, and the Fact Checker verifies each claim against its source before it reaches you; the mechanics are explained in how verified citations work. Retractions are rarer in the humanities than in the sciences but not unknown, and CiteDash shows retraction badges in your library and blocks retracted papers from citation.

Reading habits pay off here too. If you kept quotations tied to page numbers as you read, your 'p. 214' claims are checkable in seconds; if you reconstructed them from memory at the end, every footnote is a small gamble.

MHRA quick checklist

Before submission, run this list against a printed chapter, because spacing and superscript errors hide on screen:

• First citation of every source is a full footnote; later ones are short forms.
• Single quotes for articles and chapters, italics for books and journals.
• 'ed. by' and 'trans. by' written out in full.
• Bibliography entries inverted, without cited pages or final full stops.
• Angle brackets and accessed dates on every web source.
• Every footnote actually supports the sentence it is attached to.