How to format your references using the Public Choice citation style

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

Meier, R. P. (2000). Diminishing diversity of signed languages. Science (New York, N.Y.), 288(5473), 1965b.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mohr, J. J., & Forsberg, R. (2002). Remote sensing: searching for new islands in sea ice. Nature, 416(6876), 35.

A journal article with 3 authors

Husale, S., Persson, H. H. J., & Sahin, O. (2009). DNA nanomechanics allows direct digital detection of complementary DNA and microRNA targets. Nature, 462(7276), 1075–1078.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Kumar, E. A., Chen, Q., Kizhake, S., Kolar, C., Kang, M., Chang, C.-E. A., et al. (2013). The paradox of conformational constraint in the design of Cbl(TKB)-binding peptides. Scientific reports, 3, 1639.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mascia, L. (2011). Polymers in Industry from A-Z. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Prohens, J., & Nuez, F. (Eds.). (2008). Vegetables I: Asteraceae, Brassicaceae, Chenopodicaceae, and Cucurbitaceae (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Richter, J., & Silvestrov, S. (2016). Computing Burchnall–Chaundy Polynomials with Determinants. In S. Silvestrov & M. Rančić (Eds.), Engineering Mathematics II: Algebraic, Stochastic and Analysis Structures for Networks, Data Classification and Optimization (pp. 57–63). Cham: 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 Public Choice.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014, June 27). New Species Of Mammal Discovered in Africa. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-species-mammal-discovered-africa/. 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. (1990). GAO Electronic Document Request Service (No. 142758). 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

Tubbs, M. A. (2014). The use of hand-constructed graphs in Microcomputer-Based Laboratories for kinematics instruction (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, 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

Wagner, J. (2017, May 28). Mets’ Bullpen Undermines An Outburst Of Offense. New York Times, p. SP3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Meier 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Meier 2000; Mohr and Forsberg 2002).

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

Two authors: (Mohr and Forsberg 2002)
Three or more authors: (Kumar et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Public Choice
Abbreviation	Public Choice
ISSN (print)	0048-5829
ISSN (online)	1573-7101
Scope	Economics and Econometrics Sociology and Political Science