How to format your references using the American Sociological Review citation style

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

Cyranoski, David. 2002. “Satellite Set to Keep Track of Whales.” Nature 415(6870):354.

A journal article with 2 authors

Herbst, Daniel, and Alexandre Mas. 2015. “Peer Effects on Worker Output in the Laboratory Generalize to the Field.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 350(6260):545–49.

A journal article with 3 authors

Storch, David, Petr Keil, and Walter Jetz. 2012. “Universal Species-Area and Endemics-Area Relationships at Continental Scales.” Nature 488(7409):78–81.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kokoszka, Jason E., Katrina G. Waymire, Shawn E. Levy, James E. Sligh, Jiyang Cai, Dean P. Jones, Grant R. MacGregor, and Douglas C. Wallace. 2004. “The ADP/ATP Translocator Is Not Essential for the Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore.” Nature 427(6973):461–65.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Brower, Michael C. 2012. Wind Resource Assessment. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Hughes, Diane. 2016. The New Music Industries: Disruption and Discovery. edited by M. Evans, G. Morrow, and S. Keith. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Johnson, Lashaune. 2016. “What Is Social Capital?” Pp. 53–66 in Social Capital and Community Well-Being: The Serve Here Initiative, Issues in Children’s and Families’ Lives, edited by A. G. Greenberg, T. P. Gullotta, and M. Bloom. 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 Sociological Review.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2015. “Possible Link Between Red Meat Consumption And Increased Cancer Risk Identified.” IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 (https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/possible-link-between-red-meat-consumption-and-increased-cancer-risk-identified/).

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. 1998. Information Technology: Assessment of the Commerce Department’s Report on Worker Demand and Supply. T-HEHS-98-144. 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

Datta, Aditi. 2017. “Speech Synthesis Using Unsupervised Learning.” Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Prochnik, George. 2017. “He Remade Kings.” New York Times, January 6, BR17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Cyranoski 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Cyranoski 2002; Herbst and Mas 2015).

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

Two authors: (Herbst and Mas 2015)
Three authors: (Storch, Keil, and Jetz 2012)
4 or more authors: (Kokoszka et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Sociological Review
Abbreviation	Am. Sociol. Rev.
ISSN (print)	0003-1224
Scope	Sociology and Political Science