How to format your references using the Canadian Public Policy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Canadian Public Policy (CPP). 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

Kerr, R. A. 2000. “GEOPHYSICS: Atmosphere Drives Earth’s Tipsiness.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 289(5480):710.

A journal article with 2 authors

Butte, N. F., and K. J. Ellis. 2003. “Comment on ‘Obesity and the environment: where do we go from here?’” Science (New York, N.Y.) 301(5633):598; author reply 598.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hinde, C. A., R. A. Johnstone, and R. M. Kilner. 2010. “Parent-offspring conflict and coadaptation.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 327(5971):1373–1376.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Schreiber, K., J. D. Crawford, M. Fetter, and D. Tweed. 2001. “The motor side of depth vision.” Nature 410(6830):819–822.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ravindran, K. 2014. The Mathematics of Financial Models. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Baroglio, Cristina, Piero A. Bonatti, Jan Małuszyński, Massimo Marchiori, Axel Polleres, and Sebastian Schaffert, eds. 2008. Reasoning Web: 4th International Summer School 2008, Venice, Italy, September 7-11, 2008, Tutorial Lectures. Vol. 5224. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bichsel, P., J. Camenisch, B. De Decker, J. Lapon, V. Naessens, and D. Sommer. 2012. “Data-Minimizing Authentication Goes Mobile.” In Communications and Multimedia Security: 13th IFIP TC 6/TC 11 International Conference, CMS 2012, Canterbury, UK, September 3-5, 2012. Proceedings, ed. B. D. Decker and D. W. Chadwick, 55–71. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Canadian Public Policy.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2015. “Eight-Year-Old Dies Of Polio In Laos.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/8-year-old-has-died-polio-laos/.

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. 1993. DOD Computer Contracting: Inadequate Management Wasted Millions of Dollars. 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

Tromp, M. 2015. “Bayesian monitoring of clinical trials: Examples using conjugate priors.” Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: 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

Kelly, K., and C. Bray. 2017. “Held to Account.” New York Times, April 10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kerr 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kerr 2000; Butte and Ellis 2003).

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

Two authors: (Butte and Ellis 2003)
Three or more authors: (Schreiber et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Canadian Public Policy
Abbreviation	Can. Public Policy
ISSN (print)	0317-0861
Scope	Sociology and Political Science Public Administration