How to format your references using the Mathematical Social Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mathematical Social Sciences. 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

Smaglik, P., 2004. Back to life. Nature 429, 483.

A journal article with 2 authors

Purvis, A., Hector, A., 2000. Getting the measure of biodiversity. Nature 405, 212–219.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen, I., Christie, P.J., Dubnau, D., 2005. The ins and outs of DNA transfer in bacteria. Science 310, 1456–1460.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Stagno, V., Bindi, L., Shibazaki, Y., Tange, Y., Higo, Y., Mao, H.-K., Steinhardt, P.J., Fei, Y., 2014. Icosahedral AlCuFe quasicrystal at high pressure and temperature and its implications for the stability of icosahedrite. Sci. Rep. 4, 5869.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dvorak, R., Lhotka, C., 2013. Celestial Dynamics. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Idowu, M.O., Dumur, C.I., Garrett, C.T. (Eds.), 2015. Molecular Oncology Testing for Solid Tumors: A Pragmatic Approach, 1st ed. 2015. ed. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Rrenja, A., Matulevičius, R., 2015. Pattern-Based Security Requirements Derivation from Secure Tropos Models, in: Ralyté, J., España, S., Pastor, Ó. (Eds.), The Practice of Enterprise Modeling: 8th IFIP WG 8.1. Working Conference, PoEM 2015, Valencia, Spain, November 10-12, 2015, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 59–74.

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 Mathematical Social Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Cat Parasite Modified Into An Effective Cancer Vaccine [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cat-parasite-modified-effective-cancer-vaccine/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1977. Organizational Structure and Information Systems Used To Manage the Army’s Depot-Level Maintenance Programs (No. 103401). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Culver, M.D., 2015. Assessing the influence of emotional intelligence on effective fire service leadership (Doctoral dissertation). Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

CHRISTOPHER KELLY; Christopher Kelly is a fellow in ancient history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1990. Paganism Was Alive and Well. New York Times 743.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Purvis and Hector, 2000; Smaglik, 2004).

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

Two authors: (Purvis and Hector, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Stagno et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Mathematical Social Sciences
Abbreviation	Math. Soc. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0165-4896
Scope	Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty General Psychology General Social Sciences Sociology and Political Science