How to format your references using the Research in Post-Compulsory Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Research in Post-Compulsory Education. 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

Brown, Brandon R. 2003. “Neurophysiology: Sensing Temperature without Ion Channels.” Nature 421 (6922): 495.

A journal article with 2 authors

Levison, Harold F., and Alessandro Morbidelli. 2003. “The Formation of the Kuiper Belt by the Outward Transport of Bodies during Neptune’s Migration.” Nature 426 (6965): 419–421.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cumings, J., P. G. Collins, and A. Zettl. 2000. “Peeling and Sharpening Multiwall Nanotubes.” Nature 406 (6796): 586.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Kepecs, Adam, Naoshige Uchida, Hatim A. Zariwala, and Zachary F. Mainen. 2008. “Neural Correlates, Computation and Behavioural Impact of Decision Confidence.” Nature 455 (7210): 227–231.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Raj, P. Prithvi, and Serdar Erdine. 2012. Pain-Relieving Procedures. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Cowling, Peter, and Peter Merz, eds. 2010. Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization: 10th European Conference, EvoCOP 2010, Istanbul, Turkey, April 7-9, 2010. Proceedings. Vol. 6022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Grabis, Jānis, and Jānis Kampars. 2016. “Design of Capability Delivery Adjustments.” In Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops: CAiSE 2016 International Workshops, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June 13-17, 2016, Proceedings, edited by John Krogstie, Haralambos Mouratidis, and Jianwen Su, 52–62. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. 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 Research in Post-Compulsory Education.

Blog post

Davis, Josh. 2015. “Yawns Are Contagious In Budgies.” 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. 1994. FAA Technical Training. RCED-94-296R. 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

Hayes, Monica G. 2010. “A Qualitative Case Study of Cultural Competency among Advanced Placement Teachers in Florida.” Doctoral dissertation, Phoenix, AZ: University of Phoenix.

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

Hernández, Javier C., and Jesse Drucker. 2017. “Wooing China Investors With the Trump Name And Offers of U.S. Visas.” New York Times, May 19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brown 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Brown 2003; Levison and Morbidelli 2003).

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

Two authors: (Levison and Morbidelli 2003)
Three authors: (Cumings, Collins, and Zettl 2000)
4 or more authors: (Kepecs et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Research in Post-Compulsory Education
ISSN (print)	1359-6748
ISSN (online)	1747-5112
Scope	Education