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

Widera, A., 2015. Physics. A walk across a quantum lattice. Science 347, 1200–1201.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ernest, S.K., Brown, J.H., 2001. Delayed compensation for missing keystone species by colonization. Science 292, 101–104.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yang, D.-S., Lao, C., Zewail, A.H., 2008. 4D electron diffraction reveals correlated unidirectional behavior in zinc oxide nanowires. Science 321, 1660–1664.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Cao, Y., Fatemi, V., Demir, A., Fang, S., Tomarken, S.L., Luo, J.Y., Sanchez-Yamagishi, J.D., Watanabe, K., Taniguchi, T., Kaxiras, E., Ashoori, R.C., Jarillo-Herrero, P., 2018. Correlated insulator behaviour at half-filling in magic-angle graphene superlattices. Nature 556, 80–84.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Straus, S.E., Sackett, D.L., 2013. Mentorship in Academic Medicine. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Grothaus, M., 2011. Taking Your iPhone to the Max, iOS 5 Edition. Apress, Berkeley, CA.

A chapter in an edited book

Lin, H., Pass, R., Seth, K., Telang, S., 2016. Output-Compressing Randomized Encodings and Applications, in: Kushilevitz, E., Malkin, T. (Eds.), Theory of Cryptography: 13th International Conference, TCC 2016-A, Tel Aviv, Israel, January 10-13, 2016, Proceedings, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 96–124.

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., 2015. Fish Oil Or Snake Oil? Most Capsules Don’t Contain What They Promise [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/fish-oil-or-snake-oil-most-capsules-don-t-contain-what-they-promise/ (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. The National School Lunch Program: Is It Working? (No. PAD-77-6). 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

Warren, S.M., 2015. The leadership process: An analysis of follower influence on leader behavior in hospital organizations (Doctoral dissertation). Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

Kishkovsky, S., Sulcas, R., 2015. Acid Attack Victim to Leave the Bolshoi. New York Times C4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Widera, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Ernest and Brown, 2001; Widera, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Ernest and Brown, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Cao et al., 2018)

About the journal

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

Research and Writing Guides