How to format your references using the Methods in Psychology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Methods in Psychology. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Dever, T.E., 2012. Molecular biology. A new start for protein synthesis. Science 336, 1645–1646.

A journal article with 2 authors

Leeman, D.S., Brunet, A., 2014. Stem cells: Sex specificity in the blood. Nature 505, 488–490.

A journal article with 3 authors

Vogel, E.K., McCollough, A.W., Machizawa, M.G., 2005. Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to working memory. Nature 438, 500–503.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Bearhop, S., Fiedler, W., Furness, R.W., Votier, S.C., Waldron, S., Newton, J., Bowen, G.J., Berthold, P., Farnsworth, K., 2005. Assortative mating as a mechanism for rapid evolution of a migratory divide. Science 310, 502–504.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

O’Gorman, T.W., 2012. Adaptive Tests of Significance Using Permutations of Residuals with R and SAS®. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Wolf, B.A., Enders, S. (Eds.), 2011. Polymer Thermodynamics: Liquid Polymer-Containing Mixtures, Advances in Polymer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Sun, C., Deng, Y., Tang, B., Zhong, S., 2016. Urban Traffic Operation Pattern and Spatiotemporal Mode Based on Big Data (Taking Beijing Urban Area as an Example), in: Bian, F., Xie, Y. (Eds.), Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystem: Third International Conference, GRMSE 2015, Wuhan, China, October 16-18, 2015, Revised Selected Papers, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 32–47.

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 Methods in Psychology.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. U.S. Halts Research On Viral Super-Strains, Citing Safety Concerns [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/us-halts-research-viral-super-strains-citing-safety-concerns/ (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, 2002. Social Security Administration: Agency Must Position Itself Now to Meet Profound Challenges (No. GAO-02-289T). 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

Chamberlain, A.D., 2014. Policy and Behavior: Essays in Applied Microeconomics (Doctoral dissertation). University of California San Diego, La Jolla, 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

Walsh, M.W., 2010. As Payouts Rise, New Tactics By the U.S. Pension Insurer. New York Times B5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dever, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Dever, 2012; Leeman and Brunet, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Leeman and Brunet, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Bearhop et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Methods in Psychology
ISSN (print)	2590-2601
Scope