How to format your references using the British Journal of Educational Psychology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for British Journal of Educational Psychology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Vinogradov, A. E. (2004). Testing genome complexity. Science (New York, N.Y.), 304(5669), 389–390; author reply 389-90.
A journal article with 2 authors
Petro, E. J., & Raben, D. M. (2013). Bacterial expression strategies for several Sus scrofa diacylglycerol kinase alpha constructs: solubility challenges. Scientific Reports, 3, 1609.
A journal article with 3 authors
Deán-Ben, X. L., Bay, E., & Razansky, D. (2014). Functional optoacoustic imaging of moving objects using microsecond-delay acquisition of multispectral three-dimensional tomographic data. Scientific Reports, 4, 5878.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Prosperi, M. C. F., Yin, L., Nolan, D. J., Lowe, A. D., Goodenow, M. M., & Salemi, M. (2013). Empirical validation of viral quasispecies assembly algorithms: state-of-the-art and challenges. Scientific Reports, 3, 2837.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
AIChE technical manual. (1998). Dow’s Chemical Exposure Index Guide. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Andreß, H.-J. (2013). Applied Panel Data Analysis for Economic and Social Surveys (K. Golsch & A. W. Schmidt, Eds.). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Goolsby, R. (2008). The DoD Encounters the Blogosphere. In H. Liu, J. J. Salerno, & M. J. Young (Eds.), Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction (pp. 25–25). Springer US.

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 British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014, December 15). What Happens When You Saw A Rubber Band Ball in Half? IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (2011). Chemical Assessments: Challenges Remain with EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System Program (GAO-12-42). 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
Shah, R. A. (2010). Who am I? A biracial and interfaith woman’s perspective: A personal narrative [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
Vecsey, G. (2010, November 22). Less Than Two Years In, Sanchez Era Has Arrived. New York Times, D5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Vinogradov, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Petro & Raben, 2013; Vinogradov, 2004).

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

  • Two authors: (Petro & Raben, 2013)
  • Three authors: (Deán-Ben et al., 2014)
  • 6 or more authors: (Prosperi et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal titleBritish Journal of Educational Psychology
AbbreviationBr. J. Educ. Psychol.
ISSN (print)0007-0998
ISSN (online)2044-8279
ScopeDevelopmental and Educational Psychology
Education

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