How to format your references using the Journalism Practice citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journalism Practice. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Vedral, Vlatko. 2006. “A Better than Perfect Match.” Nature 439 (7075): 397.
A journal article with 2 authors
Cowman, Alan F., and Brendan S. Crabb. 2002. “The Plasmodium Falciparum Genome--a Blueprint for Erythrocyte Invasion.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 298 (5591): 126–128.
A journal article with 3 authors
Munday, J. N., Federico Capasso, and V. Adrian Parsegian. 2009. “Measured Long-Range Repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz Forces.” Nature 457 (7226): 170–173.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Soden, Brian J., Darren L. Jackson, V. Ramaswamy, M. D. Schwarzkopf, and Xianglei Huang. 2005. “The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 310 (5749): 841–844.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Klepinger, Linda L. 2006. Fundamentals of Forensic Anthropology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Piel, Jörn, ed. 2010. Natural Products via Enzymatic Reactions. Vol. 297. Topics in Current Chemistry. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Smyth, Padhraic. 2006. “Data-Driven Discovery Using Probabilistic Hidden Variable Models.” In Algorithmic Learning Theory: 17th International Conference, ALT 2006, Barcelona, Spain, October 7-10, 2006. Proceedings, edited by José L. Balcázar, Philip M. Long, and Frank Stephan, 28–28. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Journalism Practice.

Blog post
Hale, Tom. 2016. “What’s The Absolute Farthest You Can Get On Planet Earth From Any Other Human Beings?” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/whats-the-absolute-farthest-you-can-get-on-planet-earth-from-any-other-human-beings/.

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. 1983. Need To Improve Management of ACDA’s Automatic Data Processing and Operations Analysis Functions. NSIAD-83-66. Washington, DC: 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
Kramer-Duffield, Jacob. 2010. “Beliefs and Uses of Tagging among Undergraduates.” Doctoral dissertation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.

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
Walsh, Mary Williams. 2015. “Puerto Rico Officials to Testify on Debt Crisis Before Senate Panel.” New York Times, September 29.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Vedral 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Vedral 2006; Cowman and Crabb 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Cowman and Crabb 2002)
  • Three authors: (Munday, Capasso, and Parsegian 2009)
  • 4 or more authors: (Soden et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournalism Practice
ISSN (print)1751-2786
ISSN (online)1751-2794
ScopeCommunication

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