How to format your references using the Social Psychology Quarterly citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Social Psychology Quarterly. 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
Gershon, D. 2000. “Western Researchers Reap Rich Rewards in Eastern Institutions.” Nature 407(6804):657–58.
A journal article with 2 authors
Davidson, K., and N. Smith. 2000. “A Massive Cool Dust Torus around Eta Carinae?” Nature 405(6786):532.
A journal article with 3 authors
Pertea, M., S. L. Salzberg, and M. J. Gardner. 2000. “Finding Genes in Plasmodium Falciparum.” Nature 404(6773):34; discussion 34-5.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Kupfer, Alexander, Hendrik Müller, Marta M. Antoniazzi, Carlos Jared, Hartmut Greven, Ronald A. Nussbaum, and Mark Wilkinson. 2006. “Parental Investment by Skin Feeding in a Caecilian Amphibian.” Nature 440(7086):926–29.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Habart-Corlosquet, Marine, Jacques Janssen, and Raimondo Manca. 2013. VaR Methodology for Non-Gaussian Finance. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Schwetje, Gerald. 2007. The Business Plan: How to Win Your Investors’ Confidence. edited by S. Vaseghi. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Rueckert, D., R. Chandrashekara, P. Aljabar, K. K. Bhatia, J. P. Boardman, L. Srinivasan, M. A. Rutherford, L. E. Dyet, A. D. Edwards, J. V. Hajnal, and R. Mohiaddin. 2006. “Quantification of Growth and Motion Using Non-Rigid Registration.” Pp. 49–60 in Computer Vision Approaches to Medical Image Analysis: Second International ECCV Workshop, CVAMIA 2006 Graz, Austria, May 12, 2006 Revised Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by R. R. Beichel and M. Sonka. 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 Psychology Quarterly.

Blog post
Fang, Janet. 2014. “New Dinosaur Was Largest Known Terrestrial Predator Of The Jurassic.” IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 (https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-dinosaur-was-largest-known-terrestrial-predator-jurassic/).

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. 1992. Truck Safety: The Safety of Longer Combination Vehicles Is Unknown. RCED-92-66. 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
Chhun, Surya. 2010. “Assessing the Role of Vacuolar Trafficking in Fifteen Candidate Env Genes at the Late Endosome to Vacuole Interface in S. Cerevisiae.” Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Gustines, George Gene. 2011. “Warming Up to a Cold Run.” New York Times, February 11, C33.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gershon 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Davidson and Smith 2000; Gershon 2000).

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

  • Two authors: (Davidson and Smith 2000)
  • Three authors: (Pertea, Salzberg, and Gardner 2000)
  • 4 or more authors: (Kupfer et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleSocial Psychology Quarterly
AbbreviationSoc. Psychol. Q.
ISSN (print)0190-2725
ScopeSocial Psychology

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