How to format your references using the Contemporary Family Therapy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Contemporary Family Therapy. 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
McCabe, H. (2000). France sets up elite Internet school. Nature, 405(6785), 381.
A journal article with 2 authors
Kruse, E., & Agol, E. (2014). KOI-3278: a self-lensing binary star system. Science (New York, N.Y.), 344(6181), 275–277.
A journal article with 3 authors
Logoteta, D., Fiori, G., & Iannaccone, G. (2014). Graphene-based lateral heterostructure transistors exhibit better intrinsic performance than graphene-based vertical transistors as post-CMOS devices. Scientific reports, 4, 6607.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Shon, J. W., Ohta, J., Ueno, K., Kobayashi, A., & Fujioka, H. (2014). Fabrication of full-color InGaN-based light-emitting diodes on amorphous substrates by pulsed sputtering. Scientific reports, 4, 5325.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Larrieu, N., & Varet, A. (2014). Rapid Prototyping of Software for Avionics Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Berbari, A., & Mancia, G. (Eds.). (2015). Arterial Disorders: Definition, Clinical Manifestations, Mechanisms and Therapeutic Approaches. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Jiang, W., Zhu, J., Xu, J., Li, Z., Zhao, P., & Zhao, L. (2015). HV: A Feature Based Method for Trajectory Dataset Profiling. In J. Wang, W. Cellary, D. Wang, H. Wang, S.-C. Chen, T. Li, & Y. Zhang (Eds.), Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015: 16th International Conference, Miami, FL, USA, November 1-3, 2015, Proceedings, Part I (pp. 46–60). 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 Contemporary Family Therapy.

Blog post
Davis, J. (2016, November 11). Dinosaurs May Have Evolved Up To 20 Million Years Earlier Than Thought. IFLScience. IFLScience. Accessed 30 October 2018

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. (2002). Mass Transit: Federal Action Could Help Transit Agencies Address Security Challenges (No. GAO-03-263). 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
Schroder, G. L. (2015). A quantitative study of critical thinking skills in bachelors of science nursing program students (Doctoral dissertation). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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
Greenhouse, L. (2005, November 29). Case Reopens Abortion Issue for Justices. New York Times, p. A21.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McCabe 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kruse and Agol 2014; McCabe 2000).

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

  • Two authors: (Kruse and Agol 2014)
  • Three or more authors: (Shon et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleContemporary Family Therapy
AbbreviationContemp. Fam. Ther.
ISSN (print)0892-2764
ISSN (online)1573-3335
ScopeClinical Psychology
Social Psychology
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Cultural Studies
General Psychology

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