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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Malin, G. (2006). Oceans. New pieces for the marine sulfur cycle jigsaw. Science (New York, N.Y.), 314(5799), 607–608.
A journal article with 2 authors
Barkana, R., & Loeb, A. (2003). Spectral signature of cosmological infall of gas around the first quasars. Nature, 421(6921), 341–343.
A journal article with 3 authors
Ye, J., Kimble, H. J., & Katori, H. (2008). Quantum state engineering and precision metrology using state-insensitive light traps. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5884), 1734–1738.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Koçer, Z. A., Fan, Y., Huether, R., Obenauer, J., Webby, R. J., Zhang, J., Webster, R. G., & Wu, G. (2014). Survival analysis of infected mice reveals pathogenic variations in the genome of avian H1N1 viruses. Scientific Reports, 4, 7455.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Aasma, A., Dutta, H., & Natarajan, P. N. (2017). An Introductory Course in Summability Theory. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Moore, T., & Shenoi, S. (Eds.). (2010). Critical Infrastructure Protection IV: Fourth Annual IFIP WG 11.10 International Conference on Critical Infrastructure Protection, ICCIP 2010, Washington, DC, USA, March 15-17, 2010, Revised Selected Papers (Vol. 342). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Lin, H., Pass, R., Seth, K., & Telang, S. (2016). Output-Compressing Randomized Encodings and Applications. In E. Kushilevitz & T. Malkin (Eds.), Theory of Cryptography: 13th International Conference, TCC 2016-A, Tel Aviv, Israel, January 10-13, 2016, Proceedings, Part I (pp. 96–124). 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 Police Practice and Research.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014, March 25). Can Light Orbit A Black Hole? 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. (2014). Federal Vehicle Fleets: GSA Has Opportunities to Further Encourage Cost Savings for Leased Vehicles (GAO-14-443). 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
Lackey, G. M. (2015). The efficacy of using a natural soil additive for the establishment, survival and diversity of native prairie and spontaneously colonizing plant communities on unirrigated green roofs in a humid subtropical climate [Doctoral dissertation]. Mississippi State 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
Robbins, L. (2015, May 28). Yemeni-Americans Sue Over Passport Woes. New York Times, A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Malin, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Barkana & Loeb, 2003; Malin, 2006).

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

  • Two authors: (Barkana & Loeb, 2003)
  • Three authors: (Ye et al., 2008)
  • 6 or more authors: (Koçer et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titlePolice Practice and Research
AbbreviationPolice Pract. Res.
ISSN (print)1561-4263
ISSN (online)1477-271X
ScopeSocial Sciences (miscellaneous)
Law

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