How to format your references using the Cognitive Psychology citation style

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

Adam, D. (2000). Plastics that conduct win inventors chemistry prize. Nature, 407(6805), 662.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kleinteich, T., & Gorb, S. N. (2014). Tongue adhesion in the horned frog Ceratophrys sp. Scientific Reports, 4, 5225.

A journal article with 3 authors

Altabet, M. A., Higginson, M. J., & Murray, D. W. (2002). The effect of millennial-scale changes in Arabian Sea denitrification on atmospheric CO2. Nature, 415(6868), 159–162.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Karl, D. M., Laws, E. A., Morris, P., Williams, P. J. L., & Emerson, S. (2003). Global carbon cycle: metabolic balance of the open sea. Nature, 426(6962), 32.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Spence, R. (2008). Introductory Circuits. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Pieprzyk, J., Ghodosi, H., & Dawson, E. (Eds.). (2007). Information Security and Privacy: 12th Australasian Conference, ACISP 2007, Townsville, Australia, July 2-4, 2007. Proceedings (Vol. 4586). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Guerraggio, A., & Paoloni, G. (2013). Days of Firing from a Dirigible. In G. Paoloni (Ed.), Vito Volterra (pp. 77–97). 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 Cognitive Psychology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2016, September 7). NASA’s Record-Breaking Astronaut Safely Returns To Earth. 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. (2015). Motor Carrier Safety: Additional Research Standards and Truck Drivers’ Schedule Data Could Allow More Accurate Assessments of the Hours of Service Rule (GAO-15-641). 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

Eslava Rios, J. (2015). Automatic melanoma detection in dermatological images [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. (2011, September 10). Open Is Dominated By News of the Weird. New York Times, D4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Adam, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Adam, 2000; Kleinteich & Gorb, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Kleinteich & Gorb, 2014)
Three authors: (Altabet et al., 2002)
6 or more authors: (Karl et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Cognitive Psychology
Abbreviation	Cogn. Psychol.
ISSN (print)	0010-0285
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Developmental and Educational Psychology Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Linguistics and Language