[Solved] MHRA Style - Citation issues: 1st & later references

edited June 11, 2020
Hello,
I am fairly new to Zotero and my technical skills are somewhat limited.
I have to use the MHRA Style for literary essays, so I downloaded the "Modern Humanities Research Association 3rd edition (note with bibliography)" style.

(1) Now, according to MHRA, the first quotation should give full reference to the work in a footnote.
This works.
(2) Later references, however, should be included in the body of the essay in an abbreviated form. [e.g.: (Last name of author, p. 96) for a journal and (Book title in italics, p. 96) for books.
This doesn't work, as Zotero just keeps repeating (1) and I end up with lots of footnotes of sources I had already cited before.

I looked through the discussion forum, but couldn't really find an answer.

Am I using Zotero wrong?
If so, could somebody point out my mistakes and/or a way to adapt the MHRA style script?

I'd be thankful for any help!
  • edited June 11, 2020
    Hi,

    I think this is a misunderstanding how subsequent citations work.
    Subsequents will also be added in a footnote, but in an abbreviated form (authors and pages, basically). Zotero (and other softwares) cannot mix a note style with an in-text style.

    As long as you are adding the citations via the "Add/Edit citation" button in the Zotero pane, Zotero and the CSL citation style will do this correctly to the MHRA manual.

    This is how it looks correctly:

    body of text:
    some text.... 1
    Some other statement with new source of same article.2

    Footnotes:

    1 John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, ‘The Varieties of Capitalism and Hybrid Success’, Comparative Political Studies, 40.3 (2007), 302–37 .
    2 Campbell and Pedersen, p. 333.

  • Adding to the comments of @damnation, it is also worth noting that official MHRA style request all citations in notes. If you really need to include subsequent citations in the body of the text, you're probably using a derivative, but not MHRA proper.
  • Thank you for your replies!
    I noticed that my university "mixes" both the MHRA author-date style and the MHRA Footnotes version, so Zotero is not at fault. You confirmed my suspicion. :-)

    I added the "Modern Humanities Research Association 3rd edition (author-date)" style to the list with "Modern Humanities Research Association 3rd edition (note with bibliography)" and played around with both a bit. I guess I have to use both from now on.

    I also realised that for most sources, I didn't add a short title, so the footnotes looked terribly clogged, as Zotero used the full-length titles instead.
Sign In or Register to comment.