How to Reference in MHRA Style — UK Guide with Examples 2026-2027

MHRA is a footnote system, not an author-date one — and that single fact trips up more humanities students than any other. Instead of (Author, Year) in brackets, you drop a small superscript number, let the full source sit at the foot of the page, and gather everything again in a bibliography at the end.

This free guide shows you exactly how to reference in MHRA style, with worked format templates and real examples for every source type you are likely to meet — book, chapter, journal article, edited collection, website, newspaper, thesis and archival source. You will see how a first (full) footnote differs from a shortened one, when to use ibid., and how the bibliography is arranged. Projectsdeal has helped UK humanities students reference accurately since 2001; every model we write is human-written under our Zero AI Policy with free Turnitin reports, supplied as reference and study material.

What MHRA referencing is and why humanities students need it

If you are studying history, English, modern languages, classics, art history, theology or philosophy at a UK university, there is a good chance your department asks for MHRA referencing. MHRA stands for the Modern Humanities Research Association, and its style guide is one of the standard authorities for how humanities scholars cite their sources. What makes it feel different from the styles science and social-science students use is simple: MHRA is a footnote system. There are no author-date brackets scattered through your sentences. Instead, you place a small raised (superscript) number where the citation belongs, and the reader looks down to a numbered note at the foot of the page for the full details.

This suits the way humanities writing actually works. Historians and literary critics quote closely, comment on their sources, and often need to say something about a reference — a footnote gives you room to add a comment, a cross-reference or a nuance without breaking the flow of your argument. Learning how to reference in MHRA style therefore means learning two connected things at once: how to build a footnote, and how to build the matching bibliography entry, because the two are arranged and punctuated differently even though they contain the same information. Get that relationship clear and the rest of MHRA falls into place quickly. The sections below take you through the whole system with format templates and real, worked examples, and if you would rather see how the different UK styles compare, our UK referencing styles guide sets them side by side.

Footnotes vs bibliography: the two-part MHRA system

Every MHRA-referenced piece has two distinct components, and confusing them is the single most common reason students lose easy marks. The first component is the footnote (or endnote, if your tutor prefers notes gathered at the end). Each time you quote, paraphrase or draw on a source, you add a superscript number, and a correspondingly numbered note gives the full reference the first time that source appears. In a footnote the author’s name stays in normal order — first name then surname — the note ends with a full stop, and it points to the exact page you used, written as p. 45 for one page or pp. 45–47 for a range.

The second component is the bibliography, a single alphabetical list of every source you cited, placed at the very end of your work. Here the differences begin. The first author’s name is inverted — surname first — so the list can be alphabetised. There are no footnote numbers. Entries carry no closing full stop. And for journal articles and book chapters you give the whole page range of the piece, not the single page you happened to cite. Reading the table below across each row shows the same source expressed both ways, which is the quickest route to internalising the pattern.

First (full) footnote vs subsequent (shortened) footnote, and ibid.

MHRA draws a firm line between the first time you cite a source and every time after that. The first citation gives the full details — author, title, publication information and page. On any later citation of the same work you must switch to a shortened footnote: the author’s surname, a short but recognisable version of the title, and the page. So a book first cited as Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 45 becomes, later on, simply Jardine, Worldly Goods, p. 88. Repeating the full publication details on a second citation is a classic error that markers notice immediately.

Then there is ibid. — short for the Latin ibidem, ‘in the same place’. Use it only when a note refers to exactly the same source as the note immediately before it, with no other source intervening. If the page is also the same, Ibid. stands alone; if only the page differs, write Ibid., p. 92. One important, current nuance: the latest MHRA guidance now recommends using the short-title form (Jardine, Worldly Goods, p. 92) in preference to ibid., and it has dropped the old op. cit. and loc. cit. forms altogether. Many UK departments still teach and accept ibid., however, so the safe rule is: check your tutor’s preference, then apply whichever you choose consistently. The table shows the same source cited three times in sequence.

Referencing books, chapters and edited collections in MHRA

Printed books are the backbone of most humanities bibliographies, so it pays to get their format automatic. For a whole book, the footnote runs: author’s name in normal order, the title in italics, then the place of publication, publisher and year in round brackets, and finally the page. A chapter or essay in an edited collection adds two things: the chapter title in single quotation marks (in roman, not italic) before the book title, and the editor’s name after ‘ed. by’. When you cite a chapter you also give the chapter’s full page range and then, in brackets, the specific page — for example pp. 17–39 (p. 22). An edited collection cited as a whole puts the editor first, followed by ‘ed.’ in brackets.

Notice how each footnote below converts into its bibliography twin: the first author’s name flips to surname-first, the closing full stop disappears, and the single-page pinpoint is dropped in favour of the full range for the chapter. Because MHRA sits alongside the other footnoting style UK students meet, it is worth seeing how a very similar system handles the same sources — our Oxford referencing guide is the natural companion, and students working in literature often also need the MLA referencing guide for American-facing journals.

Referencing journal articles, newspapers and websites in MHRA

Beyond books, most essays draw on journal articles, and their format is where the italics-versus-quotation-marks rule really earns its keep. The article’s own title goes in single quotation marks and stays upright; the journal title is italicised. After the journal title you give the volume and issue joined by a full stop (8.1), the year in brackets, then the article’s full page range, and finally the specific page in brackets: 3–53 (p. 12). Note that MHRA does not put ‘p.’ before the range that follows the year — the number stands alone — but it does use ‘p.’ inside the final pinpoint bracket.

Newspaper articles follow a similar shape but give a full date instead of a volume, and websites replace publication details with a URL in angle brackets and, crucially, the date you accessed the page in square brackets — because online material can change or vanish. Increasingly, online sources also carry a DOI or a stable URL, which you should prefer where one exists. If you would like to draft your notes quickly and then refine them by hand, our free MHRA referencing generator gives you a first draft to check against the templates here.

Referencing theses and primary or archival sources

Dissertations and higher-level essays often lean on unpublished theses and primary or archival material, and MHRA handles both with clear conventions. Because a thesis is unpublished, its title takes single quotation marks rather than italics, followed by a description in brackets that states the degree, the awarding university and the year: (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2018). This immediately tells the reader the status of the work.

Primary and archival sources — letters, manuscripts, state papers, minutes — do not fit a single rigid template, because archives organise their holdings differently. The governing principle is simple: give enough detail for the reader to locate the exact item again. That normally means a description of the document, its date, the repository (with location), and the collection or reference number, plus a folio or page where relevant. Always defer to any house style your archive or department specifies. The table gives worked examples of both, in footnote and bibliography form.

Building the bibliography: alphabetical, surname-first, no numbers

Once your footnotes are in place, the bibliography is largely a matter of re-sorting the same information. Gather every source you cited into one list at the end of the work and arrange it alphabetically by the first author’s surname. Only the first author’s name is inverted; any co-authors that follow stay in normal order. A source with no named author is alphabetised by its title, ignoring a leading ‘The’ or ‘A’. Most departments ask for a hanging indent, where the first line sits flush left and subsequent lines are indented, so the surnames form a clean scanning column.

Remember the three things that distinguish a bibliography entry from its footnote: no reference number, no closing full stop, and the full page range for articles and chapters rather than a single pinpoint. Where a piece uses many manuscripts, MHRA allows — and archival work often requires — a bibliography split into sections, typically ‘Primary Sources’ and ‘Secondary Sources’, each alphabetised in turn. If an author has several works, list them together, alphabetised by title, and you may replace the repeated name with a long dash on the second and later entries. These small conventions are exactly the kind of detail a good academic writing guide reinforces, and getting them right is what turns a competent bibliography into a polished one.

Punctuation, italics and capitalisation rules that markers check

MHRA is precise about small marks, and consistency here separates strong referencing from careless referencing. The governing rule for italics versus quotation marks is about wholeness: a self-contained work — a book, a journal, a newspaper, a film, a play, a long poem published on its own — is set in italics. A part of a larger work — an article, a chapter, an essay, a short poem, a web page — goes in single quotation marks and stays in roman (upright) type. Get this pairing right and most of MHRA looks after itself.

On capitalisation, English-language titles take maximal capitalisation: capitalise the first word and every principal word (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns), leaving articles, short prepositions and conjunctions in lower case unless they open the title. Titles in other languages follow that language’s own conventions — French and Italian, for instance, use minimal (sentence-style) capitalisation. On page references, use p. for a single page and pp. for a range, and join ranges with an en dash (3–53), not a hyphen. Separate the elements of a note with commas, close a footnote with a full stop, and give the superscript number after the punctuation in your text, not before it. None of these rules is difficult; the marks are simply lost when they are applied unevenly.

Common MHRA mistakes and how to avoid them

Most MHRA errors are not conceptual — they are small habits repeated across a whole essay, which is exactly why they cost marks in bulk. The most frequent is failing to shorten later notes: students give the full publication details every time a source reappears, when only the first note should be full. Close behind is adding a full stop to bibliography entries, which MHRA does not use, and mixing up italics and quotation marks so that an article ends up italicised or a book ends up in inverted commas.

Other recurring slips include using p. where a range needs pp.; giving a single page in the bibliography when an article requires its full range; omitting the access date on web sources; and using ibid. when another source sits between the two notes, which breaks the ‘same place’ logic entirely. A final, subtler error is an inconsistent short title — calling a book Worldly Goods in one note and A New History in another — so the reader cannot match the citation back to the full note. The remedy for all of these is the same: reference as you write rather than at the end, keep this page open beside your draft, and do one dedicated pass over your notes and bibliography purely to check punctuation, italics and short forms. If you would like a second pair of expert eyes, we can format or check your citations for you.

How a worked model helps you master MHRA

Rules on a page will only take you so far; what makes referencing click is seeing it done well across a real essay. That is the value of a fully referenced model answer: you watch how a specialist actually deploys footnotes in an argument — when to cite, how much to say in a note, how a first full citation gives way to a clean short form three pages later, and how the bibliography pulls it all together. Reading MHRA in action, rather than in isolation, is what turns the mechanical rules into a habit you can reproduce in your own work.

Projectsdeal has produced bespoke, human-written model essays for UK humanities students since 2001, and correct MHRA referencing is built into every one. The point is never to hand in our work; it is supplied as reference and study material so you can see exactly how strong referencing looks and then apply the same standard yourself. If you are staring at a brief and thinking “could someone build me an example so I can see how the footnotes should work,” a model built to your topic is the honest way to get that clarity — and to leave you more capable of doing it unaided next time.

Scope, deliverables and an honest process

Whether you need a full model essay referenced in MHRA or simply want your existing footnotes and bibliography checked and formatted, every piece of work is produced by a UK humanities specialist — never a template, never machine-generated. Model essays arrive fully referenced in correct MHRA style, with real, current sources, accurate short forms and a properly alphabetised bibliography. Referencing checks return your citations corrected against the MHRA Style Guide with the fixes explained, so you learn from them. You receive free Turnitin AI and similarity reports with every order, proof that the work is human-written under our Zero AI Policy.

Our process is deliberately transparent. You send the brief or the draft, the referencing requirement, the level and the deadline; we confirm what is realistic before you pay rather than promising the impossible; a matched specialist does the work; and you receive it with free unlimited revisions if anything needs adjusting. Everything is covered by our money-back and on-time guarantees, and larger orders can be paid in instalments. Students across the arts and humanities use us, and the same care applies whether you are writing a literature essay that also needs MLA for an American journal or a history dissertation deep in archival footnotes.

Pricing factors and turnaround

There is no single price for referencing help, because the work varies — formatting an existing reference list is a very different task from writing a fully referenced model essay from scratch. Rather than quote a flat figure, we price against the factors that genuinely affect the work, and the instant calculator gives you an exact quote in seconds. Free Turnitin reports, referencing and unlimited revisions are always included, whatever the size of the order.

As a rough guide, a straightforward referencing check is often turned around quickly, while a full model essay with extensive MHRA footnoting needs longer for the sources to be found and cited properly. We would always rather agree a realistic deadline than rush a piece that then models bad practice. You can order online 24x7, or message us on WhatsApp at +447447882377 to check a deadline before you commit.

Integrity, Zero AI and confidentiality — your honest questions answered

The most important question students ask is whether using a model is legitimate. Our answer is clear: everything we produce is supplied as reference and study material under an academic-integrity policy, not for submission. A model MHRA-referenced essay works exactly like a worked exemplar — the kind lecturers themselves use to show what ‘good’ looks like — and you use it to learn how to structure your argument and cite your sources, then write your own work. Used that way, it strengthens your understanding rather than replacing it, and it keeps you firmly on the right side of your university’s regulations.

The second concern is AI, and referencing is where it is most dangerous. Generative AI is notorious for fabricating references — inventing plausible-looking authors, titles and page numbers that do not exist — an error a humanities marker spots instantly and that can trigger a misconduct case. That is why our Zero AI Policy is absolute and why we supply free Turnitin AI and similarity reports as proof of human authorship on every order. Finally, confidentiality: your identity, your brief and any draft you send are protected under GDPR and never shared. The same specialists and standards support students across the arts and humanities, so whatever your module throws at you, the same honest, human, expert help is there.

Bringing it together

MHRA rewards one thing above all: consistency. Once you accept that it is a footnote system, that the first citation is full and every later one is shortened, and that self-contained works are italicised while parts of works sit in single quotation marks, the whole style becomes predictable. The footnote and the bibliography carry the same facts in a slightly different arrangement — normal name order and a full stop in the note, inverted name and no full stop in the list — and the worked examples on this page give you a template for every source you are likely to cite.

Keep this guide open beside your next essay, reference as you write rather than at the end, and do one deliberate pass to check your italics, your p. and pp., and your short titles. If you would like your referencing checked, or a fully referenced MHRA model built to your exact brief, our specialists have supported UK humanities students since 2001, with 115,000+ orders, a 4.9/5 rating and human-written, Zero AI work — here to make correct referencing feel straightforward, and to leave you more capable than you were before.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is MHRA referencing and who uses it?
MHRA is the referencing system of the Modern Humanities Research Association. It is a footnote (or endnote) system, so you place a small superscript number in your text and give the full source details in a numbered note at the foot of the page, then list every source again in a bibliography at the end. It is standard in history, English, modern languages, classics, art history, theology, philosophy and many arts and humanities degrees across the UK.

2. What is the difference between a footnote and a bibliography entry in MHRA?
A footnote gives the author’s name in normal order (first name then surname), ends with a full stop, and points to the exact page you used — for example, p. 45. A bibliography entry inverts the first author’s name (surname first, for alphabetical ordering), carries no footnote number, and takes no closing full stop; for articles it gives the whole page range rather than a single page. Same information, different arrangement and punctuation.

3. How do I reference a book in MHRA style?
First footnote: Author First-name Surname, Title of Book (Place of publication: Publisher, Year), p. page — for example, Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 45. In the bibliography the same book becomes: Jardine, Lisa, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), with no page number and no full stop at the end.

4. How do I reference a journal article in MHRA?
The article title goes in single quotation marks and the journal title in italics: Author, ‘Title of Article’, Journal Title, Volume.Issue (Year), full page range (p. specific page). For example: Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8.1 (1969), 3–53 (p. 12). In the bibliography you invert the name and keep the full range 3–53 without the single-page pinpoint.

5. What is the difference between a first (full) footnote and a subsequent (shortened) one?
The first time you cite a source you give the full details. Every time afterwards you use a shortened form — the author’s surname, a short version of the title, and the page: Jardine, Worldly Goods, p. 88. The short title must be recognisable and consistent so the reader can match it to the full note and the bibliography. Never repeat the full publication details on a second citation.

6. When and how do I use ibid. in MHRA?
Ibid. (from ibidem, ‘in the same place’) refers to the source in the note immediately before it. Use Ibid. alone if the page is identical, or Ibid., p. 92 if only the page changes. It works only when no other source comes between the two notes. Note that the latest MHRA guidance now prefers a short-title form (Jardine, Worldly Goods, p. 92) over ibid., but ibid. remains widely accepted — follow your department’s preference and be consistent.

7. How is the MHRA bibliography different from the footnotes?
The bibliography lists every source alphabetically by author surname, with the first author’s name inverted (surname, first name). It has no footnote numbers, usually uses a hanging indent, and entries end without a full stop. For journal articles and chapters it gives the complete page range rather than the single page you cited in the note. Unattributed works are alphabetised by title.

8. How do I reference a chapter in an edited collection?
Put the chapter title in single quotation marks and the book title in italics, and name the editor after ‘ed. by’: Author, ‘Title of Chapter’, in Title of Book, ed. by Editor Name (Place: Publisher, Year), pp. range (p. specific). For example: Peter Burke, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Cambridge History of the Renaissance, ed. by Alison Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 17–39 (p. 22).

9. How do I reference a website in MHRA?
Give the author or organisation, the page title in single quotation marks, the site name, the URL in angle brackets, and the date you accessed it in square brackets: ‘MHRA Style Guide’, Modern Humanities Research Association <http://www.mhra.org.uk/style> [accessed 20 July 2026]. The access date matters because online content can change or disappear.

10. How do I reference a newspaper article in MHRA?
Author, ‘Headline’, Newspaper Title, Day Month Year, page (for print) — for example: Charlotte Higgins, ‘How the Renaissance Was Reinvented’, Guardian, 12 March 2020, p. 8. For an online article, replace the page with the URL in angle brackets and an [accessed] date.

11. How do I reference a thesis or dissertation?
Give the title in single quotation marks (not italics, because it is unpublished), then describe it in brackets: Author, ‘Title of Thesis’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University, Year), p. page. For example: Jane Smith, ‘Rhetoric and Power in Tudor England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2018), p. 88.

12. How do I reference a primary or archival source?
Describe the document, then give its date, the repository, and the collection or reference number so the reader could locate it: Letter from Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, 3 June 1536, The National Archives, Kew, SP 1/104, fol. 12. Archival conventions vary, so follow any specific format your archive or department specifies, but always give enough detail to find the item again.

13. What are the italics and quotation-mark rules in MHRA?
Titles of whole, self-contained works — books, journals, newspapers, films, plays — are italicised. Titles of parts of works — articles, chapters, poems, essays, web pages — go in single quotation marks and stay in roman (upright) type. English-language titles use maximal capitalisation, meaning you capitalise the first word and all principal words.

14. What are the most common MHRA referencing mistakes?
The frequent errors are: repeating full details instead of shortening later notes; putting a full stop at the end of bibliography entries (there should be none); using p. for a range instead of pp.; forgetting the access date on web sources; mixing up italics and quotation marks; giving a single page in the bibliography instead of the full range; and using ibid. when another source intervenes.

15. Do superscript numbers go before or after the punctuation?
In MHRA the superscript reference number is placed after the punctuation, typically at the end of the sentence or clause it supports — so it follows the full stop, comma or closing quotation mark rather than sitting before it. Notes are numbered consecutively through the whole piece.

16. Can Projectsdeal help me get my MHRA referencing right?
Yes. Alongside this free guide, our UK humanities specialists produce fully referenced model essays and can check or format your footnotes and bibliography in correct MHRA style. Everything is human-written under our Zero AI Policy with free Turnitin reports, supplied as reference and study material, and we have supported UK students since 2001.