How to format your references using the Social Psychology citation style

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

Lovelock, J. (2003). Gaia: the living Earth. Nature, 426(6968), 769–770.

A journal article with 2 authors

Elowitz, M., & Lim, W. A. (2010). Build life to understand it. Nature, 468(7326), 889–890.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wang, K., Dickinson, R. E., & Liang, S. (2009). Clear sky visibility has decreased over land globally from 1973 to 2007. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5920), 1468–1470.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Hershkovitz, I., Duval, M., Grün, R., Mercier, N., Valladas, H., Ayalon, A., Bar-Matthews, M., Weber, G. W., Quam, R., Zaidner, Y., & Weinstein-Evron, M. (2018). Response to Comment on “The earliest modern humans outside Africa.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 362(6413).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nash, J. (2013). Diabetes and Wellbeing. Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Wang, T.-D., Li, X., Chen, S.-H., Wang, X., Abbass, H., Iba, H., Chen, G.-L., & Yao, X. (Eds.). (2006). Simulated Evolution and Learning: 6th International Conference, SEAL 2006, Hefei, China, October 15-18, 2006. Proceedings (Vol. 4247). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Liao, Z., Hu, M., Rui, M., Cao, S., & Liao, Z. (2010). (∈ , ∈ ∨ q (λ, μ))-Fuzzy h-Ideals of Hemirings. In B.-Y. Cao, G.-J. Wang, S.-Z. Guo, & S.-L. Chen (Eds.), Fuzzy Information and Engineering 2010: Volume I (pp. 27–39). 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 Psychology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015, January 27). Medieval Men Recovering From Head Trauma Suffered Higher Risk of Dying. 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. (1995). Federally Funded R&D Centers: Use of Contract Fee by The Aerospace Corporation (NSIAD-95-174). 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

Verret, J. E. (2019). Property Tax Limitations, School District Revenues, and Equity: Analyses of Pennsylvania’s Act One [Doctoral dissertation]. George Washington 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

Vecsey, G. (2014, May 10). An Alluring Summer Song, Echoed Through Eight World Cups. New York Times, SP11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lovelock, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Elowitz & Lim, 2010; Lovelock, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Elowitz & Lim, 2010)
Three authors: (Wang et al., 2009)
6 or more authors: (Hershkovitz et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Social Psychology
ISSN (print)	1864-9335
ISSN (online)	2151-2590
Scope	Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) General Psychology Social Psychology Sociology and Political Science