How to format your references using the International Journal of Play citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Play. 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

Damasio, A. (2001). Fundamental feelings. Nature, 413(6858), 781.

A journal article with 2 authors

Guessoum, N., & Osama, A. (2015). Institutions: Revive universities of the Muslim world. Nature, 526(7575), 634–636.

A journal article with 3 authors

Deroche-Gamonet, V., Belin, D., & Piazza, P. V. (2004). Evidence for addiction-like behavior in the rat. Science (New York, N.Y.), 305(5686), 1014–1017.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

An, J., Park, J. S., Koh, A. L., Lee, H. B., Jung, H. J., Schoonman, J., Sinclair, R., Gür, T. M., & Prinz, F. B. (2013). Atomic scale verification of oxide-ion vacancy distribution near a single grain boundary in YSZ. Scientific Reports, 3, 2680.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alberty, R. A. (2011). Enzyme Kinetics: Rapid-Equilibrium Enzyme Kinetics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Ovesen, P. G., & Møller Jensen, D. (Eds.). (2012). Maternal Obesity and Pregnancy. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Ratanavilisagul, C., & Kruatrachue, B. (2014). A Modified Particle Swarm Optimization with Dynamic Particles Re-initialization Period. In S. Boonkrong, H. Unger, & P. Meesad (Eds.), Recent Advances in Information and Communication Technology: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computing and Information Technology (IC2IT2014) (pp. 33–42). Springer International Publishing.

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 International Journal of Play.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, August 6). What Happens When You Put Metal In A Microwave? IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/what-happens-when-you-put-metal-microwave/

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. (2009). Missouri River Navigation: Data on Commodity Shipments for Four States Served by the Missouri River and Two States Served by Both the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (GAO-09-224R). 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

McCready, M. (2017). Examining the Role of Community Capacity for Sustainable Water Planning through Local Urban Governance: A Case Study Analysis of Waukesha, Wisconsin [Doctoral dissertation]. Southern Illinois 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

Cowen, T. (2014, September 13). Gauging the Gender Gap, Present and Future. New York Times, BU7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Damasio, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Damasio, 2001; Guessoum & Osama, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Guessoum & Osama, 2015)
Three or more authors: (An et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	International Journal of Play
Abbreviation	Int. J. Play
ISSN (print)	2159-4937
ISSN (online)	2159-4953
Scope