How to cite books, journal articles and websites in OSCOLA

Most secondary-source referencing in a law essay comes down to three forms: a book, a journal article and something you found online. Learn those three and you can reference almost anything. This guide covers the footnote form for each under the 5th edition, and then the three things that change when the same source moves into your bibliography.

Start with the three rules underneath everything

These decide most of what follows, so they are worth more than memorising individual templates.

Names. Give the author's name as it appears on the publication, but drop titles and postnominals — no "Professor", no "KC". More than three authors? Give the first and add "and others". If no person is named but an organisation takes editorial responsibility, that organisation is the author. If nobody at all claims the work, begin with the title. Editors are treated exactly like authors.

Titles. Anything with an ISBN is italicised — that is your test for a book. Everything else goes in single quotation marks, upright, not italic. So an article title is never in italics, and a book title is never in quotation marks. Capitalise the major words; "and", "or", "the", "for" stay lowercase unless they open the title or the subtitle.

Pinpoints. They come at the end. A page number stands alone, with no "p" or "pp" in front of it. Use ch, pt and para(s) for chapters, parts and paragraphs. To point at a footnote, give the page or paragraph where its marker sits, then fn and the number.

One more, which saves a lot of wasted effort: if you read something online that also exists in hard copy — which is true of nearly every book and journal — cite the hard copy. No URL, no accessed date.

Books

The publication bracket always carries the publisher and the year. It never carries the place of publication — that is an American habit, and it is the single most common thing I correct in work from students trained outside the UK. There is a space but no punctuation between publisher and year. Editions are written 2nd edn, not "2nd ed." or "2nd edition". If the title and subtitle are not already separated by punctuation, you insert a colon.

Four variations cover nearly everything else:

• No author, only an editor or translator: cite them as the author with (ed), (eds), (tr) or (trs) after the name.
• An author and an editor or translator on the cover: cite the author normally and put the editor or translator at the front of the publication bracket.
• A chapter in an edited collection: author, then the chapter title in quotation marks, then in the editor's name (ed), then the book title in italics and the publication bracket. You do not need to give the chapter's first page.
• eBooks: if the ebook reproduces the printed page or paragraph numbers, cite it as the printed book and say nothing about the format. If it does not, name the ebook type before the publisher and pinpoint by chapter or section — or by the text around a footnote, as in ch 1, text to n 16.

Journal articles

The bracket around the year is where most marks are lost, and the rule is mechanical. If the journal has its own volume number, the year goes in round brackets and the volume number follows it — that is the form above, and it is what you use for the Modern Law Review, the Law Quarterly Review, the Cambridge Law Journal and most others. If the journal has no volume number and the year is what identifies the volume, the year goes in square brackets and no volume number follows: [2005] PL 440. Public Law and the Criminal Law Review work this way.

An issue number is almost never needed. You add one — in brackets straight after the volume — only in the unusual case where page numbering restarts with each issue.

Journal names are abbreviated and carry no full stops: MLR, never "M.L.R.". Abbreviations genuinely vary between sources, so pick one and use it consistently throughout the piece. Markers notice inconsistency far more than they notice an unusual abbreviation.

The number after the journal is the article's first page. Your pinpoint goes after it, separated by a comma, as in the example above. Articles published only online follow the same shape as far as they can, simply omitting what they do not have, such as page numbers. An article not yet in print takes (forthcoming) at the end. A case note is cited as an article — and if it has no title of its own, use the case name in italics and add (note). A book review is the same, with (book review).

Websites, blogs and online content

Note which element is italicised: the website, not the piece. The post title is in quotation marks, like an article, because it has no ISBN.

The 5th edition changed what goes in the angle brackets, and this is the part worth getting right. OSCOLA now prefers a permanent link — it points to Perma.cc — or a DOI, over an ordinary web address, because ordinary links rot. Use either and you do not need an accessed date. A DOI is not enclosed in angle brackets at all. Only if you cannot produce a permalink or DOI do you fall back to the page's own address followed by the date you accessed it.

Two things people get wrong here. You do not cite a PDF or any other downloaded file — cite the page hosting it. And for web and social media content, the author is the username exactly as the platform shows it, including the @ for X. A social media post also needs the time it was posted and the time zone you accessed it from. Video content is pinpointed by timestamp, with a colon between minutes and seconds, placed before the web address.

And if you used generative AI

The AI is the author, your instruction stands in place of a title, and the organisation that built the tool takes the publisher position. The existence of a format is not permission, though: check what your own law school allows, and remember that an AI answer is not legal authority. Cite the cases and the legislation themselves.

What changes in the bibliography

A bibliography belongs in longer work — a dissertation, thesis or book — and sits after the main text and any appendices. It lists secondary sources only. Cases and legislation do not go in it, because they are already captured by your tables of cases and legislation at the front.

Entries take the same form as your footnotes, with three deliberate differences:

1. Surname first, then initials — with no comma between the surname and the initials, but a comma after the last initial. So Hart HLA, and not "Hart, H.L.A.".
2. Initials replace forenames. "Elizabeth Fisher" in a footnote becomes "Fisher E," in the bibliography.
3. Unattributed works take a double em-dash before the title.

Then three rules about the list as a whole, and the last one surprises people:

• No full stop at the end of an entry. Footnotes end with one; bibliography entries do not. Compare the two lines in each box above.
• One alphabetical list, by author surname. Unattributed works come first, alphabetised by the first major word of the title.
• Do not split it into sections. OSCOLA does not want separate headings for books and for articles. Everything sits in a single sequence. I see this one constantly, usually because a student has been taught a different system elsewhere.

Where you cite the same author several times, list their works oldest first, and alphabetically by first major word within a single year. After the first entry, replace the author's name with a double em-dash. Works they co-wrote come after all of their sole-authored works, arranged alphabetically by the co-author's surname.

The errors I mark most often

• A place of publication in a book citation.
• "p. 45" instead of a bare 45.
• Full stops inside journal abbreviations.
• Article titles in italics and book titles in quotation marks — exactly the wrong way round.
• A database or PDF link where the source itself should be.
• Full forenames in the bibliography.
• A bibliography carved into "Books", "Articles" and "Websites".
• Full stops at the end of bibliography entries.

None of these are difficult. They cost marks because they are invisible to the person who made them — you read your own citations as what you meant, not as what is on the page. That is the whole argument for having someone else check a reference list once, early, before the habit sets into a whole dissertation.

Check which edition your university requires before you rely on any of this. Many have moved to the 5th edition, but some modules still accept the 4th, and the differences are real.

Or let me take the referencing off your hands

Referencing is the one part of legal writing with a demonstrably right answer. That is exactly what makes it the worst use of the hours before a deadline: it is solvable, so it swallows the time your argument needed. Send me your draft and I will fix the footnotes and the bibliography, so what is left of your week goes on the substance of the work rather than on the semantics of a comma and a bracket.

If you would rather learn the rules properly first, start with how to write OSCOLA footnotes correctly, the first guide in this series, and see how to write OSCOLA references in the 5th edition for what the 2026 edition altered. When you want a second pair of eyes on a real piece of work, get in touch.