How to format your references using the Perspectives on Politics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Perspectives on Politics. 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

Victora, Gabriel D. 2013. “Science & SciLifeLab Prize. Stop, Go, and Evolve.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 342(6163): 1186.

A journal article with 2 authors

Woolf, Clifford J., and Stefan Bloechlinger. 2002. “Neuroscience. It Takes More than Two to Nogo.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 297(5584): 1132–34.

A journal article with 3 authors

Falkenburger, B. H., K. L. Barstow, and I. M. Mintz. 2001. “Dendrodendritic Inhibition through Reversal of Dopamine Transport.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 293(5539): 2465–70.

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Liu, Hai-Di et al. 2014. “Antiferromagnetic Metal and Mott Transition on Shastry-Sutherland Lattice.” Scientific reports 4: 4829.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

New, T. R. 2012. Hymenoptera and Conservation. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Mitiche, Amar. 2011. 5 Variational and Level Set Methods in Image Segmentation. ed. Ismail Ben Ayed. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Sadilek, Daniel A., and Guido Wachsmuth. 2008. “Prototyping Visual Interpreters and Debuggers for Domain-Specific Modelling Languages.” In Model Driven Architecture – Foundations and Applications: 4th European Conference, ECMDA-FA 2008, Berlin, Germany, June 9-13, 2008. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, eds. Ina Schieferdecker and Alan Hartman. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 63–78.

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 Perspectives on Politics.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2014. “Highest Carbon Dioxide Levels In 800,000 Years.” IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/highest-carbon-dioxide-levels-800000-years/ (October 30, 2018).

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. 2000. Student Loans: Direct Loan Default Rates. Washington, DC: 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

Lewis, Donna S. 2010. “Global Educational Ecosystem: Case Study of a Partnership with K–12 Schools, Community Organizations, and Business.” Doctoral dissertation. Pepperdine 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

Nir, Sarah Maslin, Benjamin Mueller, and Mireya Navarro. 2015. “A Tarnished Family Empire.” New York Times: MB1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Victora 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Victora 2013; Woolf and Bloechlinger 2002).

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

Two authors: (Woolf and Bloechlinger 2002)
Three authors: (Falkenburger, Barstow, and Mintz 2001)
4 or more authors: (Liu et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Perspectives on Politics
ISSN (print)	1537-5927
ISSN (online)	1541-0986
Scope	Political Science and International Relations