How to format your references using the Social Psychology of Education citation style

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

Rosenberg, A. A. (2007). Fishing for certainty. Nature, 449(7165), 989.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kollatschny, W., & Zetzl, M. (2011). Broad-line active galactic nuclei rotate faster than narrow-line ones. Nature, 470(7334), 366–368.

A journal article with 3 authors

Oliveira, E. A., Andrade, J. S., Jr, & Makse, H. A. (2014). Large cities are less green. Scientific reports, 4, 4235.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

O’Neal, C. J., Jobling, M. G., Holmes, R. K., & Hol, W. G. J. (2005). Structural basis for the activation of cholera toxin by human ARF6-GTP. Science (New York, N.Y.), 309(5737), 1093–1096.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vaseghi, S. V. (2001). Advanced Digital Signal Processing and Noise Reduction. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Coppola, C. P., Kennedy, A. P., Jr., & Scorpio, R. J. (Eds.). (2014). Pediatric Surgery: Diagnosis and Treatment. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Gaul, L. (2012). Tutorial Guideline VDI 3830: Damping of Materials and Members. In R. Allemang, J. De Clerck, C. Niezrecki, & J. R. Blough (Eds.), Topics in Modal Analysis I, Volume 5: Proceedings of the 30th IMAC, A Conference on Structural Dynamics, 2012 (pp. 25–31). New York, NY: 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 of Education.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2014, July 24). New Evidence Suggests Tyrannosaurs Were Social Creatures. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-evidence-suggests-tyrannosaurs-were-social-creatures/. Accessed 30 October 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. (1970). Analysis of the Loan Interest Subsidy and Grant Methods of Financing Construction (No. B-164031(1)). 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

Hitchins, M. G. (2017). Domain Disparity: Informing the Debate between Domain-General and Domain-Specific Information Processing in Working Memory (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Rothenberg, B. (2016, August 31). Bouchard Is Out, but Her Concussion Suit From the 2015 Open Goes On. New York Times, p. B9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rosenberg 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Kollatschny and Zetzl 2011; Rosenberg 2007).

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

Two authors: (Kollatschny and Zetzl 2011)
Three or more authors: (O’Neal et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Social Psychology of Education
Abbreviation	Soc. Psychol. Educ.
ISSN (print)	1381-2890
ISSN (online)	1573-1928
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Social Psychology Sociology and Political Science