How to format your references using the African Journal of Psychological Assessment citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for African Journal of Psychological Assessment (AJOPA). 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
McGloin, D. (2014). Applied physics: Optical trapping for space mirrors. Nature, 506(7489), 437–438.
A journal article with 2 authors
Lichtman, J. W., & Denk, W. (2011). The big and the small: challenges of imaging the brain’s circuits. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6056), 618–623.
A journal article with 3 authors
Hsu, M., Anen, C., & Quartz, S. R. (2008). The right and the good: distributive justice and neural encoding of equity and efficiency. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5879), 1092–1095.
A journal article with 21 or more authors
Halic, M., Gartmann, M., Schlenker, O., Mielke, T., Pool, M. R., Sinning, I., & Beckmann, R. (2006). Signal recognition particle receptor exposes the ribosomal translocon binding site. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5774), 745–747.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Staudt, G. (2001). Experimentalphysik. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
An edited book
Osten, W., & Kujawinska, M. (Eds.). (2009). Fringe 2009: 6th International Workshop on Advanced Optical Metrology. Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Dyl, T. (2016). The Numerical Analysis of Burnishing Process of Hollow Steel Tubes. In J. Awrejcewicz, K. J. Kaliński, R. Szewczyk, & M. Kaliczyńska (Eds.), Mechatronics: Ideas, Challenges, Solutions and Applications (pp. 65–75). Springer International Publishing.

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 African Journal of Psychological Assessment.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014, April 14). MBARI Researchers Describe Four New “Killer Sponges.” IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mbari-researchers-describe-four-new-“killer-sponges”/

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. (2002). Business Systems Modernization: IRS Needs to Better Balance Management Capacity with System Acquisition Workload (GAO-02-356). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Altiparmak, F. (2008). Online Management and Mining of Heteregenous and Dynamic Time Series [Doctoral dissertation]. Ohio State University.

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
Cooper, B. M. (2017, June 3). The Tailor of 125th Street. New York Times, ST1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (McGloin, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Lichtman & Denk, 2011; McGloin, 2014).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

  • Two authors: (Lichtman & Denk, 2011)
  • Three or more authors: (Halic et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleAfrican Journal of Psychological Assessment
ISSN (online)2617-2798
Scope

Other styles