How to format your references using the Latin American Perspectives citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Latin American Perspectives (LAP). 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

Metzger, R. A.

2000 “The stars my incarnation.” Nature 408 (6808): 35

A journal article with 2 authors

Parker, Joanne L. and Simon Newstead

2014 “Molecular basis of nitrate uptake by the plant nitrate transporter NRT1.1.” Nature 507 (7490): 68–72

A journal article with 3 authors

Ogawa, Yuya, Bryan K. Sun, and Jeannie T. Lee

2008 “Intersection of the RNA interference and X-inactivation pathways.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 320 (5881): 1336–1341

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Shi, Yang, Hao Zhou, Xiaoli Zhang, Jingyu Wang, Jiafu Long, Zhimou Yang, and Dan Ding

2014 “Self-assembling choline mimicks with enhanced binding affinities to C-LytA protein.” Scientific reports 4: 6621

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Marsh, Nick

2014 Forensic Photography. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

An edited book

Wannemacker, Stefan De, Sylke Vandercruysse, and Geraldine Clarebout (Eds.)

2012 Serious Games: The Challenge: ITEC/CIP and T 2011: Joint Conference of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Technology, Education, and Communication, and the Scientific Network on Critical and Flexible Thinking Ghent, Belgium, October 19-21, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science Vol. 280. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

A chapter in an edited book

Gautschi, Heidi and David Gautschi

2016 “What Contexts Could Be?” pp. 121–155 in David Gautschi (ed.), Technological Innovation and Economic Transformation: A Method for Contextual Analysis. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US

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 Latin American Perspectives.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise

2015, August 6 “Psychopaths Versus Sociopaths: What Is The Difference?” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/psychopaths-versus-sociopaths-what-difference/ (accessed October 30, 2018)

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 [Aging Issues in the 1980’s: A Computerized Information System] ( No. 121285). 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

Peto, Jonathan

2009 A defense of Donald Davidson’s dissolution to the problem of global skepticism (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

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

Johnson, George

2010, August 29 “Den of Antiquities.” New York Times p. BR8

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Metzger, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Metzger, 2000, Parker & Newstead, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Parker & Newstead, 2014)
Three authors: (Ogawa, Sun, & Lee, 2008)
4 or more authors: (Shi et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Latin American Perspectives
Abbreviation	Lat. Am. Perspect.
ISSN (print)	0094-582X
ISSN (online)	1552-678X
Scope	Geography, Planning and Development Sociology and Political Science