Referencing and assignment writing  Tags: referencing essay_writing citing  

A book:

Hawkins, Harriet. Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

 Note:

• you can usually leave out the generic term 'Press,' 'Books,' etc in the publisher's name; if it is a university publisher, than shorten 'University Press' to 'UP.'
• titles of independently published works (books, journals, etc) should be italicised. The MLA Handbook actually recommends underlining, as in the past italicized type was often difficult for individual writers to produce. Now that modern word-processing software can produce acceptable italics, the English staff at UTas (and many other universities) recommend italics, not underlining.
• the publication date, publisher and place of publication should be taken from the title page of the book. If any of this information is missing on the title page, look for it the copyright page (on the reverse side of the title page). The correct date will usually be the latest copyright date.

 A work with two or more authors

 Durant, John R., Geoffrey A. Evans and Geoffrey P. Thomas. “The Public Understanding of Science.” Nature 340 (1989): 11-14.

 Two or more books by the same author

 Greenberg, Valerie D. “The Scientific Text as Literary Artefact: Reading Max Planck.” New Orleans Review 18.1 (1991): 56-63.

---. Transgressive Readings: The Texts of Franz Kafka and Max Planck. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.

A republished book

 If you are citing a republished book,  you need to include the original publication date (directly after the title) as well as the date of the edition you are using:

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. 1975. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. 1887. London: Penguin, 1981.

 An edited collection:

Cole, Douglas, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Romeo and Juliet. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970.

 Note here that a title within a title is not italicized.

Cross-Referencing

 If you are citing two or more entries from the same collection, it is a good idea to create an entry for this collection, and then cross-reference to that. For example:

 Emerson, Sheila. “The Authorization of Form: Ruskin and the Science of Chaos.” Hayles 149-66.

 Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

 Paulson, William. “Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity.” Hayles 37-53.

Multi-volume work

For a multi-volume work, add the number of volumes after the title (and any editor’s name) but before the publication information:

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Oxford Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Owen Dudley Edwards. 9 Vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

If you are only using one volume, state this instead in the same place in the entry (then you do not need to cite the volume in your parenthetical references):

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Oxford Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Owen Dudley Edwards. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

An article in an edited collection:

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Turbulence in Literature and Science.” American Literature and Science. Ed. Robert J. Scholnick. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1992. 229-50.

Note: The title of a work published as part of another work (journal article, poem in collection) is indicated  by the use of quotation marks.

An introduction:

Cave, Terence. Introduction. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. vii-xxxi.

The same pattern holds for a foreword, preface or afterword.

Missing Information

Sometimes a book will not indicate publisher, place, date of publication or pagination. If you can discover this information, indicate in square brackets that it did not come from the book itself:

 Jones, Peter. Complete Guide to Mosses and Lichen. London: U of Rummidge P, [2003].

 If the date is only approximate, indicate this in the following way: [c. 2003]. The ‘c’ stands for ‘circa.’

 If you cannot supply information, use the following abbreviations:

 n.p. = no place of publication given                     n.p. = no publisher given

n.d. = no date given                                           n. pag. = no pagination given

For example, if you do not know the publisher and the book was not paginated, you would write: London: n.p., 2003. N. pag.

If you are citing a book published before 1900, you can omit the name of the publisher and use a comma after the place of publication:

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine: An Invention. London, 1895.

If you cannot find an example for what you are looking for then use the MLA manual.