How to format your references using the American Psychologist citation style

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

Panksepp, J. (2011). Behavior. Empathy and the laws of affect. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6061), 1358–1359.

A journal article with 2 authors

Johnson, L. D. S., & Jameson, S. C. (2009). Immunology. A chronic need for IL-21. Science (New York, N.Y.), 324(5934), 1525–1526.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lykke-Andersen, J., Shu, M. D., & Steitz, J. A. (2001). Communication of the position of exon-exon junctions to the mRNA surveillance machinery by the protein RNPS1. Science (New York, N.Y.), 293(5536), 1836–1839.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Hadden, J. M., Déclais, A.-C., Carr, S. B., Lilley, D. M. J., & Phillips, S. E. V. (2007). The structural basis of Holliday junction resolution by T7 endonuclease I. Nature, 449(7162), 621–624.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Halpin, D. W., & Senior, B. A. (2009). Financial Management and Accounting Fundamentals for Construction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Klapuri, A., & Davy, M. (Eds.). (2006). Signal Processing Methods for Music Transcription. Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Durret, F., Kaastra, J. S., Nevalainen, J., Ohashi, T., & Werner, N. (2008). Soft X-Ray and Extreme Ultraviolet Excess Emission from Clusters of Galaxies. In J. Kaastra (Ed.), Clusters of Galaxies: Beyond the Thermal View (pp. 51–70). Springer.

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 Psychologist.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, June 15). Weathermen Of Westeros: Does The Climate In Game Of Thrones Make Sense? IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/weathermen-westeros-does-climate-game-thrones-make-sense/

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. (1975). Opportunity for Savings of Large Sums in Acquiring Computer Systems Under Federal Grant Programs (FGMSD-75-34). 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

Narayanan, B. C. (2008). Structure function diversity within the phosphoenolpyruvate mutase/isocitrate lyase superfamily as revealed by the enzymes oxaloacetate decarboxylase and 2,3-dimethylmalate lyase [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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, M. W. (2011, June 23). Panel Hears Complaints On Pensions At Delphi. 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 (Panksepp, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Johnson & Jameson, 2009; Panksepp, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Johnson & Jameson, 2009)
Three authors: (Lykke-Andersen et al., 2001)
6 or more authors: (Hadden et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Psychologist
Abbreviation	Am. Psychol.
ISSN (print)	0003-066X
ISSN (online)	1935-990X
Scope	General Medicine General Psychology