How to format your references using the Health policy citation style

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

[1]

Kaiser J. ECOLOGY: When Do Many Species Matter? Science 2000;289:1283.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Kuo I-FW, Mundy CJ. An ab initio molecular dynamics study of the aqueous liquid-vapor interface. Science 2004;303:658–60.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Shahabi A, Wang H, Upmanyu M. Shaping van der Waals nanoribbons via torsional constraints: scrolls, folds and supercoils. Sci Rep 2014;4:7004.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Kubota Y, Watanabe K, Tsuda O, Taniguchi T. Deep ultraviolet light-emitting hexagonal boron nitride synthesized at atmospheric pressure. Science 2007;317:932–4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Burghardt G, Walls B. Managed Futures for Institutional Investors. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

[1]

McNeill VF, Ariya PA, editors. Atmospheric and Aerosol Chemistry. vol. 339. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Wagner I, Bertacco V. Post-Silicon Verification of Multi-Core Processors. In: Bertacco V, editor. Post-Silicon and Runtime Verification for Modern Processors, Boston, MA: Springer US; 2011, p. 75–93.

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.

Blog post

[1]

O`Callaghan J. Earth’s Deepest Water May Be 1,000 Kilometers Below The Surface. IFLScience 2016.

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office. Audit of the Expenditure of Funds by the District of Columbia Public Schools, FY 1970-1971. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1973.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Spencer KH. Exploring the impact of problem -focused case writing pedagogy on novice teachers’ beliefs and practices concerning effective instructional intervention for young children and families. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington University, 2008.

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

[1]

Otis J. Falling Into Despair, and Taking Baby Steps to Get Off the Couch. New York Times 2017:A26.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Health policy
Abbreviation	Health Policy
ISSN (print)	0168-8510
Scope	Health Policy