How to format your references using the Scandinavian Political Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Scandinavian Political Studies. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Erler, J. T. 2014. ‘Cancer: Disabling defences in the brain’, Nature 508, 46–7.
A journal article with 2 authors
Hajnóczky, G. & Hoek, J. B. 2007. ‘Cell signaling. Mitochondrial longevity pathways’, Science (New York, N.Y.) 315, 607–9.
A journal article with 3 authors
Afraz, S.-R., Kiani, R. & Esteky, H. 2006. ‘Microstimulation of inferotemporal cortex influences face categorization’, Nature 442, 692–5.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Schenk, P. M. et al. 2001. ‘Flooding of Ganymede’s bright terrains by low-viscosity water-ice lavas’, Nature 410, 57–60.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Sahinoglu, M. 2016. Cyber-Risk Informatics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Bini, D. A. et al. eds. 2010. Numerical Methods for Structured Matrices and Applications: The Georg Heinig Memorial Volume. Basel: Birkhäuser.
A chapter in an edited book
Godemann, J. 2011. ‘Sustainable Communication as an Inter- and Transdisciplinary Discipline’, in Godemann, J. & Michelsen, G., eds. Sustainability Communication: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoretical Foundation, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Scandinavian Political Studies.

Blog post
Fang, J. 2014. ‘Cheetahs and Pumas Have Hunting Down to a Science’, IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/cheetahs-and-pumas-have-hunting-down-science/ [Accessed October 30, 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 2007. Commercial Aviation: Potential Safety and Capacity Issues Associated with the Introduction of the New A380 Aircraft. 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
Harvey, T. N. 2016. Effects of low pass filtered input on adult non-lexical intonation in second language acquisition. Doctoral dissertation. Long Beach, CA: 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
Dominus, S. 2015. ‘“I’m Your Childhood”’, New York Times, MM28.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Erler 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Erler 2014; Hajnóczky & Hoek 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (Hajnóczky & Hoek 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Schenk et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal titleScandinavian Political Studies
AbbreviationScan. Polit. Stud.
ISSN (print)0080-6757
ISSN (online)1467-9477
ScopeSociology and Political Science

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