How to format your references using the Psychological Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Psychological 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	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

Cornet, F. H. (2015). SEISMOLOGY. Earthquakes induced by fluid injections. Science (New York, N.Y.), 348(6240), 1204–1205.

A journal article with 2 authors

Imondi, R., & Thomas, J. B. (2003). Neuroscience. The ups and downs of Wnt signaling. Science (New York, N.Y.), 302(5652), 1903–1904.

A journal article with 3 authors

George, A. M., Iñiguez, J., & Bellaiche, L. (2001). Anomalous properties in ferroelectrics induced by atomic ordering. Nature, 413(6851), 54–57.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Cliften, P., Sudarsanam, P., Desikan, A., Fulton, L., Fulton, B., Majors, J., et al. (2003). Finding functional features in Saccharomyces genomes by phylogenetic footprinting. Science (New York, N.Y.), 301(5629), 71–76.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Evans, P. W. (2010). Top Hat. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Mattiasson, B., & Ye, L. (Eds.). (2015). Molecularly Imprinted Polymers in Biotechnology (Vol. 150). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Gaspar, M. B., & Chícharo, L. M. (2007). Modifying Dredges to Reduce By-catch and Impacts on the Benthos. In S. J. Kennelly (Ed.), By-catch Reduction in the World’s Fisheries (pp. 95–140). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Psychological Research.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, August 29). Junk Food Rats Ditch Balanced Diet To Eat Just Like Obese People. IFLScience. IFLScience. Accessed 30 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). Collection Efforts Not Keeping Pace With Growing Number of Defaulted Student Loans (No. CD-77-1). 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

Lutchman, C. (2008). Leadership impact on turnover among power engineers in the Oil Sands of Alberta (Doctoral dissertation). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Prochnik, G. (2010, May 2). Now Don’t Hear This. New York Times, p. WK11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Cornet 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Cornet 2015; Imondi and Thomas 2003).

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

Two authors: (Imondi and Thomas 2003)
Three or more authors: (Cliften et al. 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Psychological Research
Abbreviation	Psychol. Res.
ISSN (print)	0340-0727
ISSN (online)	1430-2772
Scope	Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) General Medicine Developmental and Educational Psychology Experimental and Cognitive Psychology