How to format your references using the Journal of Comparative Psychology citation style

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

Rokas, A. (2008). Genomics. Lining up to avoid bias. Science (New York, N.Y.), 319(5862), 416–417.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bouwens, R. J., & Illingworth, G. D. (2006). Rapid evolution of the most luminous galaxies during the first 900 million years. Nature, 443(7108), 189–192.

A journal article with 3 authors

Alves, J. F., Lada, C. J., & Lada, E. A. (2001). Internal structure of a cold dark molecular cloud inferred from the extinction of background starlight. Nature, 409(6817), 159–161.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Meiri, M., Huchon, D., Bar-Oz, G., Boaretto, E., Horwitz, L. K., Maeir, A. M., Sapir-Hen, L., Larson, G., Weiner, S., & Finkelstein, I. (2013). Ancient DNA and population turnover in southern levantine pigs--signature of the sea peoples migration? Scientific Reports, 3, 3035.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hopp, V. (2000). Grundlagen der Life Sciences. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Cimiano, P., Frasincar, F., Houben, G.-J., & Schwabe, D. (Eds.). (2015). Engineering the Web in the Big Data Era: 15th International Conference, ICWE 2015, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, June 23-26, 2015, Proceedings (Vol. 9114). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Manolopoulos, Y., Nanopoulos, A., Papadopoulos, A. N., & Theodoridis, Y. (2006). Processing More Complex Queries. In A. Nanopoulos, A. N. Papadopoulos, & Y. Theodoridis (Eds.), R-Trees: Theory and Applications (pp. 69–95). 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 Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, March 6). You Probably Haven’t Heard Of These Five Amazing Women Scientists – So Pay Attention. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/you-probably-haven-t-heard-these-five-amazing-women-scientists-so-pay-attention/

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. (1988). IRS’ ADP Budget: Issues That Could Affect Funding of Personnel System Project (IMTEC-88-45). 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

Dotson, K. T. (2009). Smoke points of microgravity and normal gravity coflow diffusion flames [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Wagner, J. (2017, July 4). Ball That Seems Innocuous Closes Door on a Mets Rally. New York Times, B8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rokas, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Bouwens & Illingworth, 2006; Rokas, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Bouwens & Illingworth, 2006)
Three authors: (Alves et al., 2001)
6 or more authors: (Meiri et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Comparative Psychology
Abbreviation	J. Comp. Psychol.
ISSN (print)	0735-7036
ISSN (online)	1939-2087
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Psychology (miscellaneous)

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