How to format your references using the Current Opinion in Psychology citation style

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

[1]

L.E. Bell, Cooling, heating, generating power, and recovering waste heat with thermoelectric systems, Science. 321 (2008) 1457–1461.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

E. Hoshi, J. Tanji, Integration of target and body-part information in the premotor cortex when planning action, Nature. 408 (2000) 466–470.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A.M. Kim, C.M. Tingen, T.K. Woodruff, Sex bias in trials and treatment must end, Nature. 465 (2010) 688–689.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

K. Tamai, M. Semenov, Y. Kato, R. Spokony, C. Liu, Y. Katsuyama, F. Hess, J.P. Saint-Jeannet, X. He, LDL-receptor-related proteins in Wnt signal transduction, Nature. 407 (2000) 530–535.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

P. Bonnet, Enterprise Data Governance, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

H. Ärlestig, C. Day, O. Johansson, eds., A Decade of Research on School Principals: Cases from 24 Countries, 1st ed. 2016, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

R.A. Olsen, L.B.F. Juurlink, Hydrogen Dissociation on Stepped Pt Surfaces, in: R. Díez Muiño, H.F. Busnengo (Eds.), Dynamics of Gas-Surface Interactions: Atomic-Level Understanding of Scattering Processes at Surfaces, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013: pp. 101–129.

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 Current Opinion in Psychology.

Blog post

[1]

K. Hamilton, When Parents Disagree With Doctors On A Child’s Treatment, Who Should Have The Final Say?, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/when-parents-disagree-with-doctors-on-a-childs-treatment-who-should-have-the-final-say/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Problems Found With Government Acquisition and Use of Computers From November 1965 to December 1976, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1977.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

N.L. Alai, Development of a Sport-Specific Curriculum Addressing Selfefficacy to Optimize Carbohydrate and Calorie Intake Among Male and Female High School Cross-Country Runners, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2017.

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

[1]

M. Bittman, Feast in a Day, New York Times. (2012) MM38.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Current Opinion in Psychology
Abbreviation	Curr. Opin. Psychol.
ISSN (print)	2352-250X
Scope

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