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

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

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Detrick, R. S. (2000). Seafloor spreading. Portrait of a magma chamber. Nature, 406(6796), 578–579.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wain-Hobson, S., & Weiss, R. A. (2000). If free speech costs lives that’s a high price to pay. Nature, 407(6806), 834.

A journal article with 3 authors

Culley, A. I., Lang, A. S., & Suttle, C. A. (2006). Metagenomic analysis of coastal RNA virus communities. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5781), 1795–1798.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Mota, N. B., Furtado, R., Maia, P. P. C., Copelli, M., & Ribeiro, S. (2014). Graph analysis of dream reports is especially informative about psychosis. Scientific Reports, 4, 3691.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Darbyshire, P., & Hampton, D. (2014). Hedge Fund Modelling and Analysis Using MATLAB ®. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Bras-Amorós, M., & Høholdt, T. (Eds.). (2009). Applied Algebra, Algebraic Algorithms and Error-Correcting Codes: 18th International Symposium, AAECC-18 2009, Tarragona, Spain, June 8-12, 2009. Proceedings (Vol. 5527). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Vasquez, C. (2012). Social Emergent Semantics for Personal Data Management. In P. Herrero, H. Panetto, R. Meersman, & T. Dillon (Eds.), On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2012 Workshops: Confederated International Workshops: OTM Academy, Industry Case Studies Program, EI2N, INBAST, META4eS, OnToContent, ORM, SeDeS, SINCOM, and SOMOCO 2012, Rome, Italy, September 10-14, 2012. Proceedings (pp. 23–32). 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 British Journal of Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, February 24). Bald Eagles Make A Comeback. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/bald-eagle-numbers-rebounding-not-completely-safe-yet/

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. (1977). Control of the National Science Foundation Peer Review Study (HRD-77-67). 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

Desai, S. S. (2013). CFD simuation of flow past a rotating circular cylinder with an end plate [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

Brantley, B., & Isherwood, C. (2016, December 6). Speaking Out and Listening Closely. New York Times, AR11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Detrick, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Detrick, 2000; Wain-Hobson & Weiss, 2000).

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

Two authors: (Wain-Hobson & Weiss, 2000)
Three authors: (Culley et al., 2006)
6 or more authors: (Mota et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	British Journal of Psychology
Abbreviation	Br. J. Psychol.
ISSN (print)	0007-1269
ISSN (online)	2044-8295
Scope	Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) General Psychology