How to format your references using the Psychology, Public Policy, and Law citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. 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

Marshak, M. P. (2015). My trek back to science. Science (New York, N.Y.), 349(6254), 1406.

A journal article with 2 authors

García-Bellido, D. C., & Collins, D. H. (2004). Moulting arthropod caught in the act. Nature, 429(6987), 40.

A journal article with 3 authors

Otto, S., Furlan, R. L. E., & Sanders, J. K. M. (2002). Selection and amplification of hosts from dynamic combinatorial libraries of macrocyclic disulfides. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5581), 590–593.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Pastalkova, E., Serrano, P., Pinkhasova, D., Wallace, E., Fenton, A. A., & Sacktor, T. C. (2006). Storage of spatial information by the maintenance mechanism of LTP. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313(5790), 1141–1144.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

d’Andria, A., & Gabarret, I. (2017). Building 21st Century Entrepreneurship. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Havelund, K., Núñez, M., Roşu, G., & Wolff, B. (Eds.). (2006). Formal Approaches to Software Testing and Runtime Verification: First Combined International Workshops, FATES 2006 and RV 2006, Seattle, WA, USA, August 15-16, 2006, Revised Selected Papers (Vol. 4262). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Cheng, J., & Smith, L. P. (2016). Airway and Aerodigestive Tract. In J. Cheng & J. P. Bent (Eds.), Endoscopic Atlas of Pediatric Otolaryngology (pp. 39–59). Springer International Publishing.

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 Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, September 23). A Narwhal’s Tusk May Serve As Fertility Signal. 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. (1992). Aviation Safety: FAA Needs to More Aggressively Manage Its Inspection Program (T-RCED-92-25). 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

Sandoval, V. (2013). Preventing chronic truancy among Latino high school students: A grant proposal [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

Cooper, M. (2017, May 22). Alexei Ratmansky Plans New ‘Harlequinade.’ 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 (Marshak, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (García-Bellido & Collins, 2004; Marshak, 2015).

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

Two authors: (García-Bellido & Collins, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Pastalkova et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
Abbreviation	Psychol. Public Policy Law
ISSN (print)	1076-8971
ISSN (online)	1939-1528
Scope	Social Psychology Law Sociology and Political Science