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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Political Science Review. 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

Coaker, Gitta. 2014. “Botany. Pathogen Specialization.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 343(6170): 496–97.

A journal article with 2 authors

Banfield, Jillian F., and Mark Young. 2009. “Microbiology. Variety--the Splice of Life--in Microbial Communities.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 326(5957): 1198–99.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aubret, Fabien, Richard Shine, and Xavier Bonnet. 2004. “Evolutionary Biology: Adaptive Developmental Plasticity in Snakes.” Nature 431(7006): 261–62.

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Lu, Shaoying, Jihye Seong, Yi Wang, Shiou-Chi Chang, John Paul Eichorst, Mingxing Ouyang, Julie Y-S Li, Shu Chien, and Yingxiao Wang. 2014. “Decipher the Dynamic Coordination between Enzymatic Activity and Structural Modulation at Focal Adhesions in Living Cells.” Scientific reports 4: 5756.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hersent, Olivier. 2010. IP Telephony. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Agutter, Paul S. 2007. About Life: Concepts in Modern Biology. ed. Denys N. Wheatley. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Huebner, Walter F., and W. David Barfield. 2014. “Equation of State (EOS).” In Opacity, Astrophysics and Space Science Library, ed. W. David Barfield. New York, NY: Springer, 81–121.

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 Political Science Review.

Blog post

Hale, Tom. 2016. “What If Physical Diseases Were Treated Like Mental Illnesses?” IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/what-if-physical-diseases-were-treated-like-mental-illnesses/ (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. 1978. Contemplated Legislation To Provide Telecommunications for the Deaf. 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

Stanford, Valerie. 2016. “Finding Theatre from within: Augusto Boal’s Games for Non-Actors in an Introduction to Acting Class.” 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

Gorman, James. 2016. “Judge Allows Departure of 7 Chimps to England.” New York Times: A12.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Coaker 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Banfield and Young 2009; Coaker 2014).

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

Two authors: (Banfield and Young 2009)
Three authors: (Aubret, Shine, and Bonnet 2004)
4 or more authors: (Lu et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Political Science Review
Abbreviation	Am. Polit. Sci. Rev.
ISSN (print)	0003-0554
ISSN (online)	1537-5943
Scope	Sociology and Political Science Political Science and International Relations