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 (APSR). 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

Benton, Richard. 2009. “Eppendorf Winner. Evolution and Revolution in Odor Detection.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 326 (5951): 382–83.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wang, Xiaowen, and Xin Jie Chen. 2015. “A Cytosolic Network Suppressing Mitochondria-Mediated Proteostatic Stress and Cell Death.” Nature 524 (7566): 481–84.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kicheva, Anna, Michael Cohen, and James Briscoe. 2012. “Developmental Pattern Formation: Insights from Physics and Biology.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 338 (6104): 210–12.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Ni, Xu, Ying Wu, Ze-Guo Chen, Li-Yang Zheng, Ye-Long Xu, Priyanka Nayar, Xiao-Ping Liu, Ming-Hui Lu, and Yan-Feng Chen. 2014. “Acoustic Rainbow Trapping by Coiling up Space.” Scientific Reports 4 (November):7038.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Abraham, Andrew. 2012. The Trend Following Bible. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Brinkworth, Martin, and Friedel Weinert, eds. 2012. Evolution 2.0: Implications of Darwinism in Philosophy and the Social and Natural Sciences. The Frontiers Collection. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Detroux, T., L. Renson, L. Masset, and G. Kerschen. 2016. “The Harmonic Balance Method for Bifurcation Analysis of Nonlinear Mechanical Systems.” In Nonlinear Dynamics, Volume 1: Proceedings of the 33rd IMAC, A Conference and Exposition on Structural Dynamics, 2015, edited by Gaëtan Kerschen, 65–82. Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series. Cham: 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 American Political Science Review.

Blog post

Hale, Tom. 2016. “People Who Trim Their Pubes Are More Likely To Have An STI.” IFLScience. IFLScience. December 6, 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/people-who-trim-their-pubes-are-more-likely-to-have-an-sti/.

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. 1996. “Status of Tax Systems Modernization, Tax Delinquencies, and the Potential for Return-Free Filing.” T-GGD/AIMD-96-88. 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

Donihoo, Katie. 2017. “Best Practices and Strategies Used by Church Leaders to Mitigate and Prevent Burnout Among Church Volunteers.” Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine 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

Walsh, Mary Williams. 2015. “A Hurdle to Transparency.” New York Times, November 5, 2015.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Benton 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Benton 2009; Wang and Chen 2015).

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

Two authors: (Wang and Chen 2015)
Three authors: (Kicheva, Cohen, and Briscoe 2012)
4 or more authors: (Ni 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