How to format your references using the Social Dynamics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Social Dynamics. 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
Smaglik, P. 2001. “Asthma Study Death Spurs Inquiry.” Nature 411 (6840): 873.
A journal article with 2 authors
Namouni, Faith, and Carolyn Porco. 2002. “The Confinement of Neptune’s Ring Arcs by the Moon Galatea.” Nature 417 (6884): 45–47.
A journal article with 3 authors
Back, Julian M., Scott W. McCue, and Timothy J. Moroney. 2014. “Including Nonequilibrium Interface Kinetics in a Continuum Model for Melting Nanoscaled Particles.” Scientific Reports 4 (November): 7066.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Tokunaga, Kazuaki, Noriko Saitoh, Ilya G. Goldberg, Chiyomi Sakamoto, Yoko Yasuda, Yoshinori Yoshida, Shinya Yamanaka, and Mitsuyoshi Nakao. 2014. “Computational Image Analysis of Colony and Nuclear Morphology to Evaluate Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.” Scientific Reports 4 (November): 6996.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Kondrashov, Alexey S. 2017. Crumbling Genome. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Madonna, Rosalinda, ed. 2016. Stem Cells and Cardiac Regeneration. Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Erradi, Abdelkarim, Piyush Maheshwari, and Vladimir Tosic. 2006. “Policy-Driven Middleware for Self-Adaptation of Web Services Compositions.” In Middleware 2006: ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th International Middleware Conference, Melbourne, Australia, November 27-December 1, 2006. Proceedings, edited by Maarten van Steen and Michi Henning, 62–80. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Social Dynamics.

Blog post
Andrew, Elise. 2014. “Teen Threatened With Graduation Ban For Yearbook Quote.” 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. 2002. Mass Transit: Federal Action Could Help Transit Agencies Address Security Challenges. GAO-03-263. 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
Nespoli, Giuseppe. 2017. “Impact of Supervisor Support on Employee Job Satisfaction Among Fundraising Staff Within Higher Education.” Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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
Photographs by GEORGE ETHEREDGE for THE NEW YORK TIMES. 2017. “Front Yards.” New York Times, January 6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik 2001; Namouni and Porco 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Namouni and Porco 2002)
  • Three authors: (Back, McCue, and Moroney 2014)
  • 4 or more authors: (Tokunaga et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleSocial Dynamics
AbbreviationSoc. Dyn.
ISSN (print)0253-3952
ISSN (online)1940-7874
ScopeSocial Sciences (miscellaneous)

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