How to format your references using the Forum: Qualitative Social Research (English) citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Forum: Qualitative Social Research (English) (FQS). 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

Krull, Wilhelm (2015). Hubert Markl (1938-2015). Nature, 518(7538), 168.

A journal article with 2 authors

Watson, Andrew J. A. & Williams, Jonathan M. J. (2010). Chemistry. The give and take of alcohol activation. Science (New York, N.Y.), 329(5992), 635–636.

A journal article with 3 authors

Madhu, Rajesh; Veeramani, Vediyappan & Chen, Shen-Ming (2014). Heteroatom-enriched and renewable banana-stem-derived porous carbon for the electrochemical determination of nitrite in various water samples. Scientific Reports, 4, 4679.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

van den Akker, F.; Zhang, X.; Miyagi, M.; Huo, X.; Misono, K. S. & Yee, V. C. (2000). Structure of the dimerized hormone-binding domain of a guanylyl-cyclase-coupled receptor. Nature, 406(6791), 101–104.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sugirtharajah, R. S. (2011). Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Prasher, Vee P. & Kerr, Mike (Eds.) (2016). Epilepsy and Intellectual Disabilities (2nd ed. 2016). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Hanif, Shaza; van Lon, Rinde R. S.; Gui, Ning & Holvoet, Tom (2012). Delegate MAS for Large Scale and Dynamic PDP: A Case Study. In F. M. T. Brazier, Kees Nieuwenhuis, Gregor Pavlin, Martijn Warnier, & Costin Badica (Eds.), Intelligent Distributed Computing V: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing – IDC 2011, Delft, The Netherlands – October 2011 (pp. 23–33). Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Forum: Qualitative Social Research (English).

Blog post

Taub, Ben (2016). Gorilla Gang Violence Is On The Rise In The Wild, https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/gorilla-gang-violence-rise-wild/ [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 (1994). Air Traffic Control: Better Guidance Needed for Deciding Where to Locate Facilities and Equipment (No. RCED-95-14). 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

Chen, Melissa Soriano (2014). Emergency shelter for abused and neglected elders A grant proposal project (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Belson, Ken & Pilon, Mary (2012). Round One in Sprints to Jamaica; Briton Takes 10,000. New York Times, p. SP3.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text

About the journal

Full journal title	Forum: Qualitative Social Research (English)
ISSN (print)	1438-5627
Scope