How to format your references using the Ethical Theory and Moral Practice citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 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
Baylis F (2010) Pregnant women deserve better. Nature 465:689–690
A journal article with 2 authors
Hunt TL, Lipo CP (2006) Late colonization of Easter Island. Science 311:1603–1606
A journal article with 3 authors
Haas JS, Zavala B, Landisman CE (2011) Activity-dependent long-term depression of electrical synapses. Science 334:389–393
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Zhao Y-Y, Inoue A, Chang C, et al (2014) Composition effect on intrinsic plasticity or brittleness in metallic glasses. Sci Rep 4:5733

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Higgs J, Titchen A (2008) Professional Practice in Health, Education and the Creative Arts. Blackwell Science Ltd, Oxford, UK
An edited book
Roeper T, Speas M (eds) (2014) Recursion: Complexity in Cognition. Springer International Publishing, Cham
A chapter in an edited book
Halkin H (2011) Optimal Control as Programming in Infinite Dimensional Spaces. In: Conti R (ed) Calculus of Variations, Classical and Modern. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 177–192

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 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

Blog post
Hale T (2017) This Spray-On Coating Makes Any Object Unbelievably Black. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/this-sprayon-coating-makes-any-object-unbelievably-black/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2007) Railroad Safety--Responses to Posthearing Questions. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Ziv A (2014) Dynamics in interactions with digital technology: A depth psychological/theoretical exploration of the evolutionary-biological, symbolic, and emotional psyche in the digital age. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute

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
Markoff J (2016) David Bunnell, Tech Magazine Pioneer, Dies at 69. New York Times A26

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Baylis 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Hunt and Lipo 2006; Baylis 2010).

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

  • Two authors: (Hunt and Lipo 2006)
  • Three or more authors: (Zhao et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleEthical Theory and Moral Practice
AbbreviationEthical Theory Moral Pract.
ISSN (print)1386-2820
ISSN (online)1572-8447
ScopePhilosophy
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

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