How to format your references using the Health Policy and Planning citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Health Policy and Planning. 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
Gascoigne NRJ. 2014. Immunology: Tolerance lies in the timing. Nature 515: 502–3.
A journal article with 2 authors
Forrest WF, Cavet G. 2007. Comment on ‘The consensus coding sequences of human breast and colorectal cancers’. Science (New York, N.Y.) 317: 1500; author reply 1500.
A journal article with 3 authors
McNally A, Prier CK, MacMillan DWC. 2011. Discovery of an α-amino C-H arylation reaction using the strategy of accelerated serendipity. Science (New York, N.Y.) 334: 1114–7.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
Sato M, Kojima K, Sakuma C, Murakami M, Tamada Y, Kitani H. 2014. Production of scFv-conjugated affinity silk film and its application to a novel enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Scientific reports 4: 4080.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Barnett AH, Grice J. 2011. New Mechanisms in Glucose Control. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ USA.
An edited book
Merbach W. 2007. The Long-Term Fertilization Trials in Halle (Saale), Germany: A Tool for Sustainable and Environmentally Compatible Land Management — Contributions of Plant Nutrition Science in Halle 13, Deubel A (ed). DUV: Wiesbaden.
A chapter in an edited book
Hamadeh A, Gonçalves J, Stan G-B. 2014. Analysis of Synchronizing Biochemical Networks via Incremental Dissipativity. In: Kulkarni VV, Stan G-B, Raman K (eds). A Systems Theoretic Approach to Systems and Synthetic Biology II: Analysis and Design of Cellular Systems. Springer Netherlands: Dordrecht, 117–39.

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 Health Policy and Planning.

Blog post
Davis J. 2017. Dakota Access Pipeline Has Been Leaking Oil, And It’s Not Even Operational Yet. IFLScience.

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. 2016. Statutory Copyright Licenses: Stakeholders’ Views on a Phaseout of Licenses for Broadcast Programming. No. GAO-16-496. 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
Miller RJ. 2012. An Investigation Examining the Perceived Implications of Principal Leadership Changing A Large Comprehensive High School into Smaller Learning Communities. 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
Feeney K. 2011. Animal-Free and Sermon-Free. New York Times: NJ10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gascoigne, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Forrest and Cavet, 2007; Gascoigne, 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Forrest and Cavet, 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Sato et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleHealth Policy and Planning
AbbreviationHealth Policy Plan.
ISSN (print)0268-1080
ISSN (online)1460-2237
ScopeHealth Policy

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