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

Evans, R.L., 2014, ‘Geophysics: Making the Earth move’, Nature, 509(7498), 40–41.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tosatti, E. & Prestipino, S., 2000, ‘MATERIALS SCIENCE: Weird Gold Nanowires’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 289(5479), 561–563.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, Z.-Y., Sun, K.-D. & Wang, S.-Q., 2013, ‘Enhanced community structure detection in complex networks with partial background information’, Scientific reports, 3, 3241.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

García-Hernández, D.A., García-Lario, P., Plez, B., D’Antona, F., Manchado, A. & Trigo-Rodríguez, J.M., 2006, ‘Rubidium-rich asymptotic giant branch stars’, Science (New York, N.Y.), 314(5806), 1751–1754.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Takezawa, K., 2012, Guidebook to R Graphics Using Microsoft® Windows, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Pardo, T.A.S., Branco, A., Klautau, A., Vieira, R. & Lima, V.L.S. de (eds.), 2010, Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language: 9th International Conference, PROPOR 2010, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, April 27-30, 2010. Proceedings, vol. 6001, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Chilingaryan, S., 2009, ‘The XMLBench Project: Comparison of Fast, Multi-platform XML libraries’, in L. Chen, C. Liu, Q. Liu & K. Deng (eds.), Database Systems for Advanced Applications: DASFAA 2009 International Workshops: BenchmarX, MCIS, WDPP, PPDA, MBC, PhD, Brisbane, Australia, April 20 - 23, 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science., pp. 21–34, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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, E., 2015, 9 Awesome Things You Didn’t Know About Bill Nye The Science Guy, 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, 2011, Statutory Copyright Licensing: Implications of a Phaseout on Access to Television Programming and Consumer Prices Are Unclear, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Jurica, M.L., 2012, Napping in the workplace as an invisible stigma: The moderating roles of raters’ nap habit, work ethic, and organizational policy – PhD thesis, 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

Walsh, M.W., 2012, New York Investigates Insurer Payments to Banks, New York Times, p. B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Evans 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Tosatti & Prestipino 2000; Evans 2014).

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

Two authors: (Tosatti & Prestipino 2000)
Three or more authors: (García-Hernández et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Reading and Writing
ISSN (print)	2079-8245
ISSN (online)	2308-1422
Scope