How to format your references using the American Journal of Political Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). 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:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX 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

Hakim, Antoine M. 2014. “Perspective: silent, but preventable, perils.” Nature 510(7506): S12.

A journal article with 2 authors

Manoli, Devanand S., and Bruce S. Baker. 2004. “Median bundle neurons coordinate behaviours during Drosophila male courtship.” Nature 430(6999): 564–569.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bascompte, Jordi, Pedro Jordano, and Jens M. Olesen. 2006. “Asymmetric coevolutionary networks facilitate biodiversity maintenance.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 312(5772): 431–433.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Dello Russo, N. et al. 2007. “Compositional homogeneity in the fragmented comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3.” Nature 448(7150): 172–175.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Robertson, Bernard, G. A. Vignaux, and Charles E. H. Berger. 2016. Interpreting Evidence. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Iida, Shusaku, José Meseguer, and Kazuhiro Ogata, eds. 2014. 8373 Specification, Algebra, and Software: Essays Dedicated to Kokichi Futatsugi. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Wang, Yongwen, Qianbing Zheng, and Yin Yuan. 2016. “The Improvement of March C+ Algorithm for Embedded Memory Test.” In Computer Engineering and Technology: 19th CCF Conference, NCCET 2015, Hefei, China, October 18-20, 2015, Revised Selected Papers, Communications in Computer and Information Science, eds. Weixia Xu et al. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, p. 31–37.

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 American Journal of Political Science.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2016. “Catching Metastatic Cancer Cells Before They Grow Into Tumors: A New Implant Shows Promise.” IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/catching-metastatic-cancer-cells-they-grow-tumors-new-implant-shows-promise/ (Accessed October 30, 2018).

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. 1990. Shared Resources Project: Evaluation Report. Washington, DC: 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

Brown, Joyce D. 2012. “Disparity in healthcare among Black Americans in the United States, a review of the literature.” Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Grynbaum, Michael M. 2017. “Next Act for an Editor Silver of Tongue (and Hair).” New York Times: A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hakim 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Hakim 2014; Manoli and Baker 2004).

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

Two authors: (Manoli and Baker 2004)
Three authors: (Bascompte, Jordano, and Olesen 2006)
4 or more authors: (Dello Russo et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Political Science
Abbreviation	Am. J. Pol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0092-5853
ISSN (online)	1540-5907
Scope	Sociology and Political Science Political Science and International Relations