Academic Integrity - Referencing, Citation & Avoiding Plagiarism: MHRA Style Guide
MHRA Style
Languages and Cultures from the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics use the MHRA Style. The guide is freely available online or as a PDF download, linked below.
- MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, 4th Edition, 2024The MHRA Style Guide has been widely used by scholarly authors writing about the Humanities since its first edition in 1971. It offers practical guidance on how to cite sources from medieval manuscripts to software and social media. Rules are provided to help working authors deal consistently with issues from quoting weights and measures (‘5kg’, or ‘5 kg’?) to the spelling of European city names (‘Lyons’, or ‘Lyon’?). There is detailed advice on indexing and on the compilation of bibliographies, including thorny issues around how to alphabetize names.
Introduction to Citing Generative AI
This citation and referencing advice should be used only when your module coordinator or School allows the use of AI tools in the creation of academic assignments. If you have used an AI tool in the creation of an assignment, you must acknowledge this use and cite and reference the tool appropriately to ensure you are adhering to UCD's student plagiarism policy.
Please also be aware that Generative AI is a tool and not an academic or original source.
This advice was created for text-based generative AI systems and does not include other AI-generated content. Advice about citing and referencing AI tools is constantly evolving, and this guide created on October 10th 2023, will be updated as soon as further information becomes available.
For the purposes of this guidance, generative AI is defined as a tool that “can analyze or summarize content from a huge set of information, including web pages, books and other writing available on the internet, and use that data to create original new content” (Weed).
Generative AI often provides citations and sources that do not exist, or are inaccurate. All such references must be checked by the user to ensure the legitimacy of the references/citations provided by AI tools.
Guidance:
As of the creation of this guide the editors of the MHRA citation style have not yet published guidance for citing generative AI. In the absence of guidance from the editors, UCD Library recommends treating the use of generative AI in the same manner as for citing private communications
Example for Citing Generative AI with MHRA Style
Private communications are included as in-text citations with numbered footnotes. Inclusion in the list of references is not required.
Example:
In an era when literacy was limited, complex illuminations played a pedagogical role. They helped illiterate or semi-literate individuals understand and remember the contents of the manuscript. Images and visual cues were used to convey the narratives and teachings within the text, making it accessible to a broader audience.1
1. OpenAI, ChatGPt's response to John Doe, 19 October 2023.
Works Cited
Weed, Julie. “Can ChatGPT Plan Your Vacation?” The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/travel/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-travel-vacation.html.
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