How to format your references using the Modern Language Review citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Modern Language Review. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author
McCarrey, John R., ‘EPIGENETICS. The Epigenome--a Family Affair’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 350.6261 (2015), pp. 634–35
A journal article with 2 authors
Owen-Hughes, Tom, and Michael Bruno, ‘Molecular Biology. Breaking the Silence’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 303.5656 (2004), pp. 324–25
A journal article with 3 authors
McGraw, Christopher M., Rodney C. Samaco, and Huda Y. Zoghbi, ‘Adult Neural Function Requires MeCP2’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 333.6039 (2011), p. 186
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Simeoni, Federica, Luisa Tasselli, Shinji Tanaka, Lidia Villanova, Mayumi Hayashi, Kazuishi Kubota, and others, ‘Proteomic Analysis of the SIRT6 Interactome: Novel Links to Genome Maintenance and Cellular Stress Signaling’, Scientific Reports, 3 (2013), p. 3085

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book
Waine, Colin, Obesity and Weight Management in Primary Care (Blackwell Science Ltd, 2008)
An edited book
Fränti, Pasi, Gavin Brown, Marco Loog, Francisco Escolano, and Marcello Pelillo, eds., Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition: Joint IAPR International Workshop, S+SSPR 2014, Joensuu, Finland, August 20-22, 2014. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer, 2014),
A chapter in an edited book
Bernstein, Daniel J., ‘List Decoding for Binary Goppa Codes’, in Coding and Cryptology: Third International Workshop, IWCC 2011, Qingdao, China, May 30-June 3, 2011. Proceedings, ed. by Yeow Meng Chee, Zhenbo Guo, San Ling, Fengjing Shao, Yuansheng Tang, Huaxiong Wang, and others, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer, 2011), pp. 62–80

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Modern Language Review.

Blog post
Andrews, Robin, ‘UK Solar Panels Produced More Energy Than Coal For An Unprecedented Six Months’, IFLScience (IFLScience, 2016)

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report
Government Accountability Office, NASA: Compliance with Cost Limits (U.S. Government Printing Office, 8 April 2005)

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Zanulabe Din, Muhammad Omar, ‘Engineered Synchrony of Bacterial Lysis and Its Applications’ (unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2017)

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article
Hay, George, and Antony Currie, ‘Barclays’ Appetite For a U.S. Bank’, New York Times, 11 March 2010, p. B2

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text

About the journal

Full journal titleModern Language Review
ISSN (print)0026-7937
ISSN (online)2222-4319
ScopeLanguage and Linguistics
Literature and Literary Theory
Linguistics and Language

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