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

Savage, N. 2012. “Come into the light.” Nature 483(7389):S38-9.

A journal article with 2 authors

Law, K. L., and R. C. Thompson. 2014. “Oceans. Microplastics in the seas.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 345(6193):144–145.

A journal article with 3 authors

Del Bene, F., K. Tessmar-Raible, and J. Wittbrodt. 2004. “Direct interaction of geminin and Six3 in eye development.” Nature 427(6976):745–749.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Morita, M., J. Chen, M. Fujino, Y. Kitazawa, A. Sugioka, L. Zhong, and X.-K. Li. 2014. “Identification of microRNAs involved in acute rejection and spontaneous tolerance in murine hepatic allografts.” Scientific reports 4:6649.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Schneider, B. D. 2007. Energy Leadership. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Metcalf, Gary S., ed. 2014. Social Systems and Design. Vol. 1. Translational Systems Sciences. Tokyo: Springer Japan.

A chapter in an edited book

Lorenzini, A., and A. B. Maier. 2016. “Influence of Donor Age and Species Longevity on Replicative Cellular Senescence.” In Cellular Ageing and Replicative Senescence, ed. S. I. S. Rattan and L. Hayflick, 49–70. Healthy Ageing and Longevity. 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 Canadian Public Policy.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. 2015. “Happy Birthday Philae: 7 Facts About The Amazing Comet Lander.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/happy-birthday-philae-7-thinks-weve-learned-historic-comet-landing/.

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. 1986. Telecommunication: Air Force Cost Estimates for Scope Exchange Telephone Systems. 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

Dinh, H. 2013. “A study of cell-based genetic algorithms with applications to neural networks.” 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

Dwyer, J. 2016. “Corruption in New York: An Unscrupulous History.” New York Times, April 20.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Savage 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Savage 2012; Law and Thompson 2014).

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

Two authors: (Law and Thompson 2014)
Three or more authors: (Morita et al. 2014)

About the journal

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