How to format your references using the Government and Opposition citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Government and Opposition. 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

Giles J (2001) Think like a Bee. Nature 410(6828), 510–512.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kleinberg J and Lawrence S (2001) Network Analysis. The Structure of the Web. Science (New York, N.Y.) 294(5548), 1849–1850.

A journal article with 3 authors

Loh AN, Bauer JE, and Druffel ERM (2004) Variable Ageing and Storage of Dissolved Organic Components in the Open Ocean. Nature 430(7002), 877–881.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Atkinson L et al. (2002) An ATP-Gated Ion Channel at the Cell Nucleus. Nature 420(6911), 42.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bouchet O (2012) Wireless Optical Communications. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Ghasemi A (2016) Propagation Engineering in Wireless Communications. (A. Abedi and F. Ghasemi, Eds.) (2nd ed. 2016). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Amro SA, Chiclana F, and Elizondo DA (2012) Application of Fuzzy Logic in Computer Security and Forensics. In D A Elizondo, A Solanas, and A Martinez-Balleste (eds.), Computational Intelligence for Privacy and Security. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 35–49.

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 Government and Opposition.

Blog post

Hale T (2016, August 8) Watch Indian Locals Save A Leopard From Drowning. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/watch-indian-locals-save-a-leopard-from-drowning/ (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 (1995) Transportation Trust Funds (No. AIMD-95-95R). 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

Nguyen D (2009) Deus-ex-machina: A modern skeptic’s relentless scrutiny of the production of ethics in post-colonial literature and postcolonialism (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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 (2013, August 4) Thrown by Life’s Curveballs, A Star Missed the Signals. New York Times, p. D1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Giles 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Giles 2001; Kleinberg and Lawrence 2001).

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

Two authors: (Kleinberg and Lawrence 2001)
Three authors: (Loh, Bauer, and Druffel 2004)
6 or more authors: (Atkinson, Milligan, Buckley, and Deuchars 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Government and Opposition
ISSN (print)	0017-257X
ISSN (online)	1477-7053
Scope

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