How to format your references using the Government Information Quarterly citation style

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

Vane, J. R. (2002). Biomedicine. Back to an aspirin a day? Science (New York, N.Y.), 296(5567), 474–475.

A journal article with 2 authors

Martin, W., & Koonin, E. V. (2006). Introns and the origin of nucleus-cytosol compartmentalization. Nature, 440(7080), 41–45.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cappellini, E., Collins, M. J., & Gilbert, M. T. P. (2014). Biochemistry. Unlocking ancient protein palimpsests. Science (New York, N.Y.), 343(6177), 1320–1322.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Zhang, X., Hu, C., Bai, H., Yan, Y., Li, J., Yang, H., Lu, X., & Xi, G. (2013). Construction of self-supported three-dimensional TiO2 sheeted networks with enhanced photocatalytic activity. Scientific Reports, 3, 3563.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Walke, B., Seidenberg, R., & Althoff, M. P. (2005). UMTS. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Sands, D. P. A. (2013). Conservation of the Richmond Birdwing Butterfly in Australia (T. R. New, Ed.). Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Nazaikinskii, V., Schulze, B.-W., & Sternin, B. (2014). Elliptic Operators on Noncompact Manifolds. In B.-W. Schulze & B. Sternin (Eds.), The Localization Problem in Index Theory of Elliptic Operators (pp. 71–79). 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 Government Information Quarterly.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015, January 15). Human Pathogen Found in Gray Seal Pups. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/human-pathogen-found-gray-seal-pups/

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. (2017). High Risk: Actions Needed to Address Serious Weaknesses in Federal Management of Programs Serving Indian Tribes (GAO-17-589T). 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

Bennett, A. L. (2019). An Empirical Longitudinal Analysis of Agile Methodologies and Firm Financial Performance [Doctoral dissertation]. George Washington University.

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

Pilon, M. (2013, July 15). Top Sprinters Test Positive, Jolting Track World. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Vane, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Martin & Koonin, 2006; Vane, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Martin & Koonin, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Government Information Quarterly
Abbreviation	Gov. Inf. Q.
ISSN (print)	0740-624X
Scope	Law Library and Information Sciences Sociology and Political Science