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

Wand, A.J., 2001. On the dynamic origins of allosteric activation. Science 293, 1395.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kirkwood, T.B., Austad, S.N., 2000. Why do we age? Nature 408, 233–238.

A journal article with 3 authors

Polyak, V., Hill, C., Asmerom, Y., 2008. Age and evolution of the Grand Canyon revealed by U-Pb dating of water table-type speleothems. Science 319, 1377–1380.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Mellander, L.J., Kurczy, M.E., Najafinobar, N., Dunevall, J., Ewing, A.G., Cans, A.-S., 2014. Two modes of exocytosis in an artificial cell. Sci. Rep. 4, 3847.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Scott, D.M., 2009. World Wide Rave. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Kaneko, M., Nakamura, Y. (Eds.), 2011. Robotics Research: The 13th International Symposium ISRR, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Shah, R., Eldridge, D., Palombo, E., Harding, I., 2015. Physicochemical Stability, in: Eldridge, D., Palombo, E., Harding, I. (Eds.), Lipid Nanoparticles: Production, Characterization and Stability, SpringerBriefs in Pharmaceutical Science & Drug Development. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 75–97.

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., 2015. No S#!t Study: Scientists Find That Conspiracy Theorists Will Pretty Much Believe Anything You Tell Them [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1996. Tax Systems Modernization: Progress in Achieving IRS’ Business Vision (No. T-GGD-96-123). 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

Tosti, C.L., 2009. Quantification of dispersed and aggregated iron in vivo by magnetic resonance imaging (Doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY.

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

(nyt), S.K., 2002. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Anti-Semitic Violence. New York Times A10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Wand, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Kirkwood and Austad, 2000; Wand, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Kirkwood and Austad, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Mellander 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