How to format your references using the Mental Health and Physical Activity citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mental Health and Physical Activity. 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

Spurgeon, D. (2000). Immigrants help offset Canada’s brain-drain crisis. Nature, 405(6787), 604.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tang, S., & Guo, A. (2001). Choice behavior of Drosophila facing contradictory visual cues. Science (New York, N.Y.), 294(5546), 1543–1547.

A journal article with 3 authors

Xie, X. S., Yu, J., & Yang, W. Y. (2006). Living cells as test tubes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5771), 228–230.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Floyd, K., Blanc, L., Raviglione, M., & Lee, J.-W. (2002). Resources required for global tuberculosis control. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5562), 2040–2041.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Carvalho, M. C. (2016). Practical Laboratory Automation. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Platt, U. (2008). Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy: Principles and Applications (J. Stutz, Ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Hassine, J. (2010). AsmL-Based Concurrency Semantic Variations for Timed Use Case Maps. In M. Frappier, U. Glässer, S. Khurshid, R. Laleau, & S. Reeves (Eds.), Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B and Z: Second International Conference, ABZ 2010, Orford, QC, Canada, February 22-25, 2010. Proceedings (pp. 34–46). 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 Mental Health and Physical Activity.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014, July 31). Octomom Brooded Her Eggs for Record-Breaking Four-and-a-Half Years. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (1987). Army Deployment: Better Transportation Planning Is Needed (NSIAD-87-138). 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

Ellerbrook, S. L. (2009). Exploring the efficiency and effectiveness of teacher selection tools: The effects on the total group with a focus on the gender sub-groups [Doctoral dissertation]. Lindenwood 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, S. (2017, June 21). There Goes the Gayborhood. New York Times, F6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Spurgeon, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Spurgeon, 2000; Tang & Guo, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Tang & Guo, 2001)
Three authors: (Xie et al., 2006)
6 or more authors: (Floyd et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Mental Health and Physical Activity
Abbreviation	Ment. Health Phys. Act.
ISSN (print)	1755-2966
Scope	Psychiatry and Mental health Applied Psychology