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

Lowe, J. B. (2005). Cell biology. Does Notch take the sweet road to success? Science (New York, N.Y.), 307(5715), 1570–1572.

A journal article with 2 authors

Giazotto, F., & Martínez-Pérez, M. J. (2012). The Josephson heat interferometer. Nature, 492(7429), 401–405.

A journal article with 3 authors

Șenbabaoğlu, Y., Michailidis, G., & Li, J. Z. (2014). Critical limitations of consensus clustering in class discovery. Scientific Reports, 4, 6207.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Genoux, D., Haditsch, U., Knobloch, M., Michalon, A., Storm, D., & Mansuy, I. M. (2002). Protein phosphatase 1 is a molecular constraint on learning and memory. Nature, 418(6901), 970–975.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hartfuß, H.-J., & Geist, T. (2013). Fusion Plasma Diagnostics with mm-Waves. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

McSweeney, P. L. H., & Fox, P. F. (Eds.). (2013). Advanced Dairy Chemistry: Volume 1A: Proteins: Basic Aspects, 4th Edition (4th ed. 2013). Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Bressler, S. L. (2007). The Formation of Global Neurocognitive State. In L. I. Perlovsky & R. Kozma (Eds.), Neurodynamics of Cognition and Consciousness (pp. 61–72). 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 International Journal of Play.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2016, December 7). Asteroid Day Officially Recognized As June 30 By United Nations. IFLScience; 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. (2013). Human Services: Sustained and Coordinated Efforts Could Facilitate Data Sharing While Protecting Privacy (GAO-13-106). 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

George, K. G. (2017). Revisiting “The Blue Line Blues”: Transit-Oriented Development in Inner-City Areas of Los Angeles County, 2000-2016 [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Crow, K. (2001, October 14). The End of Innocence. New York Times, 141.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lowe, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Giazotto & Martínez-Pérez, 2012; Lowe, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Giazotto & Martínez-Pérez, 2012)
Three authors: (Șenbabaoğlu et al., 2014)
6 or more authors: (Genoux et al., 2002)

About the journal

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

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