Citing Edited Books in MLA and IEEE

We’re sorry. We’ve made you wait, trembling with anticipation, for the next exciting instalment of our occasional series on referencing. Perhaps your desperation for referencing tips has led you to seek out the darker corners of the internet for dodgy tips cut with misconceptions.

Stop. We have the good stuff. And if you’re not sure how to deal with edited books in MLA and IEEE, the next few paragraphs will blow your mind.

The Basics

When dealing with edited books, the client will typically need to give an in-text citation for a specific chapter rather than the volume as a whole. The container volume will then be listed in the reference list (or list of works cited in the case of MLA).

However, your client may need to cite an editor if:

• They are referencing an entire edited volume that doesn’t have a single author.
• They are citing something the editor has contributed to the volume.

For example, this is how we’d cite the entirety of an edited book in MLA style:

Metahorror (Etchison) features stories by several horror writers.

In the above, ‘Etchison’ is actually the editor of the book, since there is no single author to cite. Furthermore, there is no page number in the citation because it refers to the entire volume (not just one part of it). If you see that a client has cited the editors when they should be citing the chapter author, though, you can leave a comment about this.

Edited Books in MLA

MLA referencing is often used in the humanities. It differs from other parenthetical referencing systems in that a date of publication is not included in citations. In-text citations for a chapter from an edited book, then, should just give the chapter author’s surname and a page number (just as the book author would be cited in the case of a non-edited book).

In the works cited list, meanwhile, the correct format is:

Chapter author surname, Chapter author first name. ‘Title of Chapter’. Title of Book, edited by Editor name. Publisher, Year, Page range.

So, for a story from the horror anthology mentioned above, we would write:

Straub, Peter. ‘The Ghost Village’. Metahorror, edited by Dennis Etchison. Dell Publishing, 1992, pp. 370-377.

Cross-Referencing in MLA

Another feature of MLA is that, when citing multiple chapters from the same edited book, you need to cross reference these against one main entry for the container volume in the works cited list. This would look something like this:

Etchison, Dennis, editor. Metahorror. Dell Publishing, 1992.

Straub, Peter. ‘The Ghost Village’. Etchison, pp. 370-377.

Streiber, Whitley. ‘The Properties of the Beast’. Etchison, pp. 162-168.

Here, for example, we have the main entry for ‘Etchison’, and the individual chapters simply refer to this rather than repeating the full publication details.

Edited Books in IEEE

IEEE referencing is used in technical fields, such as computing and engineering. Citations simply consist of a number that indicates an entry in the reference list. In the reference list itself, sources are given in the order that citations appear in the text.

The correct format for a chapter from an edited book in the reference list is:

[n] Chapter author initial and surname, ‘Title of Chapter’, in Title of Book, Editor initial and surname Ed. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year, Page range.

So ‘The Ghost Village’ could be cited like this:

[1] P. Straub, ‘The Ghost Village’, in Metahorror, D. Etchison Ed. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992, pp. 370-377.

That’s it for now. Go and have a cold shower.