How to format your references using the Psychological Review citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Psychological Review. 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
Szpiro, G. (2013). Economics: Value judgements. Nature, 500(7464), 521–523.
A journal article with 2 authors
Yang, Y., & Lisberger, S. G. (2014). Purkinje-cell plasticity and cerebellar motor learning are graded by complex-spike duration. Nature, 510(7506), 529–532.
A journal article with 3 authors
Mathew-Fenn, R. S., Das, R., & Harbury, P. A. B. (2008). Remeasuring the double helix. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322(5900), 446–449.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Su, H. T., Hsu, R. R., Chen, A. B., Wang, Y. C., Hsiao, W. S., Lai, W. C., Lee, L. C., Sato, M., & Fukunishi, H. (2003). Gigantic jets between a thundercloud and the ionosphere. Nature, 423(6943), 974–976.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Yoder, C. H., Leber, P. A., & Thomsen, M. W. (2010). The Bridge to Organic Chemistry. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Singh, H. (2016). Plasma-based Radar Cross Section Reduction (S. Antony & R. M. Jha, Eds.; 1st ed. 2016). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Bugge, K.-E., O’Gorman, B., Hill, I., & Welter, F. (2010). Regional Sustainability, Innovation and Welfare Through an Adaptive Process Model. In J. Sarkis, J. J. Cordeiro, & D. Vazquez Brust (Eds.), Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration: A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective (pp. 77–96). 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 Review.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014, May 19). Japan Wants To Put A Giant Solar Farm In Space. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/japan-wants-put-giant-solar-farm-space/

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. (1994). FAA Technical Training (RCED-94-296R). 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
Zamora, L. (2017). Azura digital health: Scheduling application and prescription service for women’s health [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
Itzkoff, D., Bai, M., Goldstein, J., Spitznagel, E., Hodgman, J., Leff, A., Rushfield, R., Veis, G., Glaser, E., Skurnick, L., Hanel, M., Newton, M., Silcoff, M., Zimmerman, E., Kelly, J., Shortz, W., Cowe, T., & Carroll, D. (2012, February 19). The One-Page Magazine. New York Times, MM11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Szpiro, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Szpiro, 2013; Yang & Lisberger, 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Yang & Lisberger, 2014)
  • Three authors: (Mathew-Fenn et al., 2008)
  • 6 or more authors: (Su et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal titlePsychological Review
AbbreviationPsychol. Rev.
ISSN (print)0033-295X
ISSN (online)1939-1471
ScopeGeneral Psychology

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