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

Offerman, S. Erik. 2004. “Materials science. Microstructures in 4D.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 305(5681): 190–191.

A journal article with 2 authors

Futahashi, Ryo, and Haruhiko Fujiwara. 2008. “Juvenile hormone regulates butterfly larval pattern switches.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 319(5866): 1061.

A journal article with 3 authors

Spinner, Marlene, Guido Westhoff, and Stanislav N. Gorb. 2014. “Subdigital setae of chameleon feet: friction-enhancing microstructures for a wide range of substrate roughness.” Scientific reports 4: 5481.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Michler, P. et al. 2000. “Quantum correlation among photons from a single quantum dot at room temperature.” Nature 406(6799): 968–970.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smith, I. M., D. V. Griffiths, and L. Margetts. 2015. Programming the Finite Element Method. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Narey, Marilyn, ed. 2009. 2 Making Meaning: Constructing Multimodal Perspectives of Language, Literacy, and Learning through Arts-based Early Childhood Education. Boston, MA: Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Abdel-Fatao, Hamidu, Jiuyong Li, and Jixue Liu. 2015. “Unifying Spatial, Temporal and Semantic Features for an Effective GPS Trajectory-Based Location Recommendation.” In Databases Theory and Applications: 26th Australasian Database Conference, ADC 2015, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, June 4-7, 2015. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, eds. Mohamed A. Sharaf, Muhammad Aamir Cheema, and Jianzhong Qi. Cham: Springer International Publishing, p. 41–53.

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

Fang, Janet. 2016. “How Plesiosaurs And Ichthyosaurs Burst Onto The Scene.” IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-plesiosaurs-and-ichthyosaurs-burst-scene/ (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. 1988. Aviation Security: Improved Controls Needed To Prevent Unauthorized Access at Key Airports. 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

Danso Odei, Prince K. 2017. “Effective Resolution of The Bibiani-Anhwianso-Bekwai District Healthcare Delivery System: An Outcome-Based Evaluative Case.” Doctoral dissertation. Capella 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

Pilon, Mary. 2014. “Can’t Play by the Rules? It’s Fine by Mr. Monopoly.” New York Times: B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Offerman 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Futahashi and Fujiwara 2008; Offerman 2004).

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

Two authors: (Futahashi and Fujiwara 2008)
Three authors: (Spinner, Westhoff, and Gorb 2014)
4 or more authors: (Michler et al. 2000)

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