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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Experimental Child 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

Gewin, V. (2008). The art of self-defence. Nature, 452(7186), 498–500.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gong, F., & Yanofsky, C. (2002). Instruction of translating ribosome by nascent peptide. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5588), 1864–1867.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bannard, O., Kraman, M., & Fearon, D. T. (2009). Secondary replicative function of CD8+ T cells that had developed an effector phenotype. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5913), 505–509.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Maeshima, Y., Sudhakar, A., Lively, J. C., Ueki, K., Kharbanda, S., Kahn, C. R., Sonenberg, N., Hynes, R. O., & Kalluri, R. (2002). Tumstatin, an endothelial cell-specific inhibitor of protein synthesis. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5552), 140–143.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Epperlein, P. W. (2013). Semiconductor Laser Engineering, Reliability and Diagnostics. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

An edited book

Pavlovic, M. (2013). Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering (B. Balint, Ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kawsar, F., Vermeulen, J., Smith, K., Luyten, K., & Kortuem, G. (2011). Exploring the Design Space for Situated Glyphs to Support Dynamic Work Environments. In K. Lyons, J. Hightower, & E. M. Huang (Eds.), Pervasive Computing: 9th International Conference, Pervasive 2011, San Francisco, USA, June 12-15, 2011. Proceedings (pp. 70–78). 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 Experimental Child Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, November 13). This Perfume Repels Mosquitoes. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/victorias-secret-perfume-repels-mosquitoes/

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. (1992). Air Traffic Control: Advanced Automation System Still Vulnerable to Cost and Schedule Problems (RCED-92-264). 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

Duncan, K. F. (2016). Middle school teachers’ self-perceptions of response to intervention [Doctoral dissertation]. Capella 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

James, M. (2016, September 7). Five or Six Things I Didn’t Know About Brad Pitt. New York Times, M2128.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gewin, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Gewin, 2008; Gong & Yanofsky, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Gong & Yanofsky, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Maeshima et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Abbreviation	J. Exp. Child Psychol.
ISSN (print)	0022-0965
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Experimental and Cognitive Psychology