How to format your references using the Political Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Political Studies. 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

Melton, L. (2005) ‘Imaging: the big picture’, Nature, 437(7059), 775–9.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tang, Y. and Cohen, A. E. (2011) ‘Enhanced enantioselectivity in excitation of chiral molecules by superchiral light’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6027), 333–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zeng, G.-M., Wu, L.-A. and Xing, H.-J. (2014) ‘Symmetry restoration and quantumness reestablishment’, Scientific reports, 4, 6377.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Romero, H. E., Bolton, K., Rosén, A. and Eklund, P. C. (2005) ‘Atom collision-induced resistivity of carbon nanotubes’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 307(5706), 89–93.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barrett-Lennard, G. T. (2014) The Relationship Inventory. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Nakatani, K. and Tor, Y. (eds.) (2016) Modified Nucleic Acids. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Bongiovanni, G. and Valentini, C. (2009) ‘Reciprocity, Balancing and Proportionality Rawls and Habermas on Moral and Political Reasonableness’, in G. Bongiovanni, G. Sartor and C. Valentini (eds.), Reasonableness and Law. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 79–107.

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 Political Studies.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016, July 14) First Ever Planetary Snow Line Directly Observed [online]. IFLScienceIFLScience. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/first-ever-planetary-snow-line-directly-observed/ [Accessed30 October 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 (1977) Status and Issues Pertaining to the Proposed Development of the Space Telescope Project ( No. PSAD-77-98). 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

McNamee, L. (2017) Best Practices in Higher Education Faculty Motivation. 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

Qiu, L. (2017, June 13) ‘Misleading Statements From President’s Cabinet’, New York Times, A13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Melton, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Melton, 2005; Tang and Cohen, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Tang and Cohen, 2011)
Three authors: (Zeng, Wu, and Xing, 2014)
6 or more authors: (Romero, Bolton, Rosén, and Eklund, 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Political Studies
Abbreviation	Polit. Stud.
ISSN (print)	0032-3217
ISSN (online)	1467-9248
Scope	Sociology and Political Science