How to format your references using the Police Practice and Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Police Practice and Research. 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

Radick, G. (2015). HISTORY OF SCIENCE. Beyond the “Mendel-Fisher controversy.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 350(6257), 159–160.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dennis, C., & Surridge, C. (2000). Arabidopsis thaliana genome. Introduction. Nature, 408(6814), 791.

A journal article with 3 authors

James, S., Simmons, C. P., & James, A. A. (2011). Ecology. Mosquito trials. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6057), 771–772.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Stone, E. C., Cummings, A. C., McDonald, F. B., Heikkila, B. C., Lal, N., & Webber, W. R. (2005). Voyager 1 explores the termination shock region and the heliosheath beyond. Science (New York, N.Y.), 309(5743), 2017–2020.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zhu, Z., & Nandi, A. K. (2014). Automatic Modulation Classification. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Nambiar, R., & Poess, M. (Eds.). (2016). Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking: Traditional to Big Data to Internet of Things: 7th TPC Technology Conference, TPCTC 2015, Kohala Coast, HI, USA, August 31 – September 4, 2015. Revised Selected Papers (1st ed. 2016, Vol. 9508). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Dowdy, J. K. (2011). Carnival Characters in the Classroom. In J. K. Dowdy & S. Kaplan (Eds.), Teaching Drama in the Classroom: A Toolbox for Teachers (pp. 17–20). SensePublishers.

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 Police Practice and Research.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2017, January 27). Scientists Restoring 150-Year-Old Taxidermy Piece Find Human Skull Inside. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/scientists-restoring-150yearold-taxidermy-piece-find-human-skull-inside/

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. (1979). Federal Research Grants: Maintaining Public Accountability Without Inhibiting Creative Research (094378). 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

Yang, L. (2012). A comparison of unsupervised learning techniques for detection of medical abuse in automobile claims [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Haigney, S. (2017, August 11). A Stolen de Kooning Emerges Decades Later. New York Times, C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Radick, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Dennis & Surridge, 2000; Radick, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Dennis & Surridge, 2000)
Three authors: (James et al., 2011)
6 or more authors: (Stone et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Police Practice and Research
Abbreviation	Police Pract. Res.
ISSN (print)	1561-4263
ISSN (online)	1477-271X
Scope	Social Sciences (miscellaneous) Law