The Modern Humanities Research Association is delighted to announce the publication of the fourth edition of the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses. This indispensable resource provides comprehensive guidance for ensuring clarity, consistency, and precision in scholarly writing across disciplines. Rules are provided to help working authors deal with issues from quoting weights and measures (‘5kg’, or ‘5 kg’?) to the spelling of European city names (‘Lyons’, or ‘Lyon’?). Comprehensively reviewed and revised by a team of experts, this fourth edition is the largest update in the Guide’s fifty-year history.

Key topics covered in the Guide include:

• Preparing copy: instructions on preparing text for submission or publication, including guidance on incorporating illustrations and tables.
• Spelling and punctuation: guidance with a focus on the practical needs of scholars, such as setting out quotations from primary sources, dealing with loan-words and non-English phrases, accents, possessives and plurals, commas, and more.
• Capitalization and italicization: conventions for capitalizing titles of works, personal titles, movements, periods, etc., and guidance on the use of italicization.
• Names: best practice for spelling and punctuation of place names, institutional names, personal names, and more.
• Dates, numbers, and quantities: instructions on incorporating numbers into your text, such as dates, currencies, and weights and measures.
• DOIs and URLs: explanation of the usages of and difference between DOIs and URLs, and instructions on how to format them.
• References: extensive guidance on the citation of all the most common kinds of source, including books, book chapters, academic journal articles, websites and social media, newspapers, medieval manuscripts, music, film, television, and more. MHRA style allows for both citation in notes and author-date citation, and guidance is provided on both. Examples are included throughout illustrating how to cite sources accurately and consistently.
• Bibliographies and indexes: guidance on alphabetizing names, creating a bibliography for the two referencing styles (citation in notes and author-date citation), and creating and formatting indexes.

The fourth edition includes a number of core changes to MHRA style, which have been introduced in the interests of simplification and adaptation to digital environments: 1) use of ‘pp.’ for the page extent in references to journal articles; 2) part number even for through-paginated journals; 3) requirements for DOIs in journal references; 4) omission of place of publication in references unless necessary. The changes are explained in a dedicated brief guide.

The MHRA Style Guide has been used for tens of thousands of UK doctoral theses since 1971, when it was first published as the MHRA Style Book. The rules included in the first edition themselves evolved from the style notes for our journal the Modern Language Review, which goes back to 1905. Several editions followed until, in 2002, it was re-named the MHRA Style Guide. The change from Book to Guide was the first recognition that writers were increasingly accessing information online, and each edition since then has responded to changes in electronic publishing and information retrieval. 

The Guide has come to be relied upon by scholars and students across the world. Whether they are writing research articles, dissertations, theses, or scholarly books, the MHRA Style Guide equips writers, researchers, editors, and students with the tools they need to communicate their ideas effectively and contribute meaningfully to their respective fields.

The Guide itself is freely available online, and is fully Open Access, published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. It is also available for purchase in a print edition, made available as cheaply as is practicable.

ENDS

The Modern Humanities Research Association encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship. The Association fulfils this purpose through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs, critical editions, translations, and the MHRA Style Guide, and by making grants in support of research. Membership is open to all who work in the humanities, whether independently or in a university post, and the participation of early-career researchers entering the field is especially welcomed.

The MHRA is a registered charity (No. 1064670). The MHRA is registered in England as a company limited by guarantee (No. 03446016). The Registered Office is: Salisbury House, Station Road, 

More info: www.mhra.org.uk