MHRA Referencing Generator

Enter your source details and get a correctly formatted MHRA 4th-edition footnote and matching bibliography entry in seconds. Built for the essays, dissertations and theses in English, history, modern languages and the arts that follow MHRA — with a live preview you can copy straight into your footnotes and works-cited list.

Used in: The arts and humanities in the UK — English literature, modern languages, history, film and cultural studies. MHRA is the house style of many humanities departments and journals, and pairs a numbered footnote with an alphabetical bibliography.

MHRA · 4th editionNotes & bibliography

Enter your source

Auto-cite from a DOI, ISBN or PubMed ID

Or fill the form yourself below. A bare web address can’t be looked up in the browser — paste its DOI instead.

Source type

A peer-reviewed article in an academic journal.

Author

Digital Object Identifier, if the source has one.

Year published

Add an author or a title and your formatted MHRA citation appears here instantly.

In your text

A raised reference number after the cited material points to a numbered footnote (or endnote), e.g. “… retrieval cues.¹”. The first footnote gives the full citation; later notes to the same work are shortened.

In your reference list

The bibliography is alphabetical by the first author’s surname with a hanging indent. The first author is inverted (“Kuhn, Thomas S.”), titles take title case, article and chapter titles sit in single quotation marks, and books, journals and websites are italicised.

MHRA tips
  • Use “and”, never “&”, between author names in both the footnote and the bibliography.
  • In the footnote, give authors in natural order; in the bibliography, invert only the first author (“Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson”).
  • Put article, chapter and web-page titles in single quotation marks; italicise book, journal, website, newspaper and proceedings titles. All titles take title (headline) case.
  • A book’s publication facts go in round brackets — (Place: Publisher, Year) — and MHRA uses “edn” for editions, e.g. “3rd edn”.
  • The footnote ends with the page you are citing (“p. 23” / “pp. 19–46”); the bibliography omits this closing page reference for books.
  • Cite a web source as ‘Title’, Site <URL> [accessed DD Month YYYY], with the access date in square brackets.

Your reference list is empty. Build a citation above and choose “Add to list” to collect your sources here, correctly ordered and ready to copy or export.

The footnote system

One source, three forms: footnote, shortened note, bibliography

MHRA is a footnotes-and-bibliography style, not an author–date one. A superscript number in your text points to a numbered footnote; the same work later appears once, alphabetised, in the bibliography. The trick is that the same source is written three different ways depending on where it sits. Follow it down the page below.

First footnote

Note 1 — full citation

The first time you cite a work, the footnote gives it in full, with authors in natural order and the exact page you are drawing on at the very end.

1Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 23.
Later footnote

Note 14 — shortened

Every later reference to the same work is shortened to the author’s surnameand the new page — never the full citation again.

14Kuhn, p. 91.
Bibliography

One entry, alphabetised

In the bibliography the work appears once, with the first author invertedfor alphabetical sorting and a book’s closing page reference dropped.

Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Author order flips
Footnotes keep the natural order (Thomas S. Kuhn); the bibliography inverts the first author (Kuhn, Thomas S.) so the list sorts by surname.
Page numbers live in the note
The exact page you are citing belongs in the footnote (p. 23, pp. 19–46) — a book’s bibliography entry carries no closing page reference.
“ibid.” for back-to-back notes
When two consecutive notes cite the very same work, the second may read ibid. (same place) or ibid., p. 91 for a different page. If other notes intervene, use the shortened surname form instead.
3
forms per source
¹
superscript marker
edn
edition abbreviation
4th
MHRA edition (2024)
Anatomy

Inside an MHRA journal article entry

Read the reference left to right. Each element carries its own punctuation, and in MHRA most of that punctuation is a comma — the parts string together rather than sitting in full-stop-separated blocks. Here is every piece, in order.

1Author(s)
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson,

In the bibliography, invert only the first author (surname, then full given name); list later authors first name first, with “, and” before the last. The element closes with a comma.

2Article title
‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’,

An article title sits in SINGLE quotation marks, in title (headline) case, with the comma placed outside the closing quote.

3Journal name
Psychological Review,

The journal is the containing work, so it is italicised in title case and followed by a comma.

4Volume
80

The volume number alone, with no “vol.” label and no issue number for a journal article.

5Year
(1973),

The year of publication in round brackets, followed by a comma — no full stop after the bracket.

6Page range
352–73.

A condensed page range with an en dash (352–73, not 352–373) and no “pp.” label in a journal entry; the entry ends with a full stop.

Single quotes, italic containers
The title of the article, chapter or web page sits in single quotation marks, while the standalone work that contains it — the journal, book or website — is italicised. Every title takes title (headline) case.
Cheat sheet

Bibliography templates for every source type

The shape changes with the source, but the logic holds: author, then the title in single quotes (or italics for a standalone work), then the publication facts. Match your source to a row, then fill in your own details — or let the generator above do it.

Journal article

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Article’, Journal Name, Volume (Year), Pages.
Worked example
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, ‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’, Psychological Review, 80 (1973), 352–73.

Book

Template
Surname, First, Title of Book, edn (Place: Publisher, Year).
Worked example
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Book chapter

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Chapter’, in Title of Book, ed. by Editor (Place: Publisher, Year), pp. xx–xx.
Worked example
McGann, Jerome J., ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’, in Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. by David C. Greetham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 19–46.

Website

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Page’, Site Name <URL> [accessed DD Month YYYY].
Worked example
Cherry, Kendra, ‘How Human Memory Works’, Verywell Mind <https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000> [accessed 15 January 2024].

Newspaper article

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Article’, Newspaper Name, DD Month YYYY.
Worked example
Carrington, Damian, ‘World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26’, The Guardian, 13 November 2021.

Online video

Template
Uploader, ‘Title of Video’, Platform, DD Month YYYY <URL>.
Worked example
Veritasium, ‘The Science of Thermodynamics’, YouTube, 2 April 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb-zVtJf9Hk>.

Conference paper

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Paper’, in Proceedings Name (Place: Publisher, Year), pp. xx–xx.
Worked example
Vaswani, Ashish, and Noam Shazeer, ‘Attention Is All You Need’, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Long Beach, CA: Curran Associates, 2017), pp. 5998–6008.

Thesis / dissertation

Template
Surname, First, ‘Title of Thesis’ (Thesis type, Institution, Year).
Worked example
Doe, Jane A., ‘Essays on Monetary Policy and Inflation Expectations’ (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 2019).

Report

Template
Organisation, Title of Report No. (Place: Publisher, Year).
Worked example
World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2023: Monitoring Health for the SDGs No. 24 (Geneva, Switzerland, 2023).
In the text

Marking citations: the superscript number

MHRA has no parenthetical author–date or author–page tag. Instead you place a superscript reference number where the citation falls, and the full detail lives in the matching footnote at the foot of the page.

The marker in your prose

The superscript number sits after the punctuation it follows, usually at the end of the sentence or clause it supports.

Memory is reconstructed at retrieval, shaped by the cues present at the time.1 Later work extended this to episodic detail.2

The matching note

  • The first note gives the full citation and ends with the cited page.
  • Page references use p. for one page and pp. for a range.
  • Notes are numbered in one continuous sequence through the work.
Authors in the footnote
List up to three authors in full, joined by the word and— never an ampersand. For four or more, give the first author followed by and others. In the footnote the names stay in natural order.
Citing a web source
Give the title in single quotes, the italicised site name, then the URL in angle brackets and the access date in square brackets: ‘Title’, Site <URL> [accessed DD Month YYYY].
Avoid these

Six MHRA slips that lose easy marks

MHRA punctuation is precise, and a few habits carried over from other styles trip people up again and again. Each pair below shows the wrong version, the corrected version, and why the rule exists.

Wrong
Tulving, Endel & Donald M. Thomson
Right
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson

Why: MHRA always joins author names with the word “and”, never an ampersand.

Wrong
Tulving, E., and D. M. Thomson
Right
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson

Why: MHRA uses full given names where the source supplies them, not initials.

Wrong
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory”
Right
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, ‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’

Why: Article, chapter and web-page titles take SINGLE quotation marks in MHRA, not double.

Wrong
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Right
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Why: MHRA abbreviates edition as “edn”, not “ed.” — “ed.” is reserved for an editor.

Wrong
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, ‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’, Psychological Review, 80 (1973), pp. 352–373.
Right
Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, ‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’, Psychological Review, 80 (1973), 352–73.

Why: A journal page range is condensed (352–73) and carries no “pp.” label; the “pp.” label belongs to chapters and conference papers.

Wrong
Cherry, Kendra, ‘How Human Memory Works’, Verywell Mind, https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000, accessed 15 January 2024.
Right
Cherry, Kendra, ‘How Human Memory Works’, Verywell Mind <https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000> [accessed 15 January 2024].

Why: MHRA wraps the URL in angle brackets and puts the access date in square brackets — “<URL> [accessed DD Month YYYY]”.

Put it together

A sample MHRA reference list

At the end of your work, the bibliography lists every source once, alphabetised by the first author's surname, with a hanging indent. Notice the variety of source types sitting together in one ordered list — books, journals, web pages and newspapers all sorted by surname.

Bibliography

  1. ACarrington, Damian, ‘World Leaders Strike Landmark Climate Deal at COP26’, The Guardian, 13 November 2021.
  2. BCherry, Kendra, ‘How Human Memory Works’, Verywell Mind <https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000> [accessed 15 January 2024].
  3. CKuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
  4. DTulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson, ‘Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory’, Psychological Review, 80 (1973), 352–73.
Hanging indent
Each entry begins flush left; subsequent lines of the same entry are indented, so the alphabetised surnames line up down the left margin.
One entry per work
However many times you cited a source in your footnotes, it appears exactly once here — the footnotes carry the page detail, the bibliography carries the alphabetical record.

This generator follows the MHRA Style Guide, 4th edition (2024). MHRA is a footnotes-and-bibliography style: a superscript reference number in the text points to a numbered footnote, and an alphabetical bibliography lists each work once. The 4th edition keeps that model from earlier editions while refreshing guidance on digital sources and access dates, and retains the style’s signatures — single quotation marks for article and chapter titles, the “edn” edition abbreviation, publication facts in round brackets, and condensed journal page ranges.

MHRA Referencing Generator — questions

Which MHRA edition does this generator use?+

It follows the MHRA Style Guide, 4th edition (2024), the current standard for most humanities courses and journals that use MHRA. The 4th edition keeps the footnotes-and-bibliography model of earlier editions while updating guidance on digital sources and access dates.

What is the difference between a footnote and a bibliography entry in MHRA?+

They carry the same information but order and punctuate it differently. The footnote gives the author in natural order (“Endel Tulving and Donald M. Thomson”) and ends with the specific page you are citing. The bibliography inverts the first author for alphabetical sorting (“Tulving, Endel, and Donald M. Thomson”) and, for a book, omits that closing page reference. This tool produces both side by side so you can copy each into the right place.

Should I use single or double quotation marks for a title in MHRA?+

Use single quotation marks for the titles of articles, chapters and web pages — for example, ‘The Rationale of Hypertext’. Titles of standalone works (books, journals, websites, newspapers and proceedings) are italicised instead of quoted. All titles take title (headline) case, which this tool applies to each field automatically.

How do I cite a source with several authors in MHRA?+

List up to three authors in full, joined by “and” before the last name; the bibliography inverts only the first. For four or more authors you may give the first author followed by “and others”. MHRA always uses the word “and”, never an ampersand.

How do I show edition, place and publisher for a book?+

A book’s publication facts sit in round brackets after the title: (Place: Publisher, Year). MHRA abbreviates edition as “edn”, so a third edition reads “3rd edn”. For example: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

How do I cite a website or online video in MHRA?+

Give the title in single quotation marks, then the italicised site or platform name, then the URL in angle brackets followed by the access date in square brackets: ‘How Human Memory Works’, Verywell Mind <https://www.verywellmind.com/how-memory-works-2795000> [accessed 15 January 2024]. The access date records when you last viewed the page.

Does the generator abbreviate journal names?+

No — it prints the full journal name, since MHRA does not use a fixed list of journal-name abbreviations. Enter the journal exactly as it appears (for example, Psychological Review) and the tool italicises it in title case for you.

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