How to format your references using the Reading and Writing citation style

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

Singh Chawla, D. (2015). “Living figures” make their debut. Nature, 521(7550), 112.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rowland, D. C., & Moser, M.-B. (2015). Neuroscience: A three-dimensional neural compass. Nature, 517(7533), 156–157.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wilson, H. R., Blake, R., & Lee, S. H. (2001). Dynamics of travelling waves in visual perception. Nature, 412(6850), 907–910.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Tang, J. A., Dugar, S., Zhong, G., Dalal, N. S., Zheng, J. P., Yang, Y., & Fu, R. (2013). Non-destructive monitoring of charge-discharge cycles on lithium ion batteries using ⁷Li stray-field imaging. Scientific reports, 3, 2596.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. (2014). Energy Materials 2014. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Helms, L. L. (Ed.). (2009). Potential Theory. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Hutchinson, T. A., & Brawer, J. R. (2011). The Challenge of Medical Dichotomies and the Congruent Physician–Patient Relationship in Medicine. In T. A. Hutchinson (Ed.), Whole Person Care: A New Paradigm for the 21st Century (pp. 31–43). New York, NY: Springer.

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 Reading and Writing.

Blog post

Andrew, D. (2017, February 24). Five Ways Nanoscience Is Making Science Fiction Into Fact. 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. (1971). Misuse of Federal Funds Provided for the Midwest Regional Conference on Science, Technology, and State Government (No. B-171679). 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

Masumdar, S. (2017). Vibration-based electromagnetic energy harvester for low-frequency road traffic (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

Murphy, M. J. O. (2015, April 3). Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of The New York Times. New York Times, p. C30.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Singh Chawla 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Rowland and Moser 2015; Singh Chawla 2015).

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

Two authors: (Rowland and Moser 2015)
Three or more authors: (Tang et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Reading and Writing
Abbreviation	Read. Writ.
ISSN (print)	0922-4777
ISSN (online)	1573-0905
Scope	Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Education Linguistics and Language Speech and Hearing