How to format your references using the Social Science Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Social Science Research. 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	Download the output style file
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

Batty, M., 2006. Rank clocks. Nature 444, 592–596.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dutton, A., Lambeck, K., 2012. Ice volume and sea level during the last interglacial. Science 337, 216–219.

A journal article with 3 authors

McDougall, I., Brown, F.H., Fleagle, J.G., 2005. Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia. Nature 433, 733–736.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Reiter, J.G., Makohon-Moore, A.P., Gerold, J.M., Heyde, A., Attiyeh, M.A., Kohutek, Z.A., Tokheim, C.J., Brown, A., DeBlasio, R.M., Niyazov, J., Zucker, A., Karchin, R., Kinzler, K.W., Iacobuzio-Donahue, C.A., Vogelstein, B., Nowak, M.A., 2018. Minimal functional driver gene heterogeneity among untreated metastases. Science 361, 1033–1037.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Borgen, U.J., Nakrem, H.A., 2016. Morphology, phylogeny and taxonomy of osteolepiform fish. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Manderson, L., Smith, W., Tomlinson, M. (Eds.), 2012. Flows of Faith: Religious Reach and Community in Asia and the Pacific. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Hospers, G.-J., Reverda, N., 2015. The Geography of Population Decline, in: Reverda, N. (Ed.), Managing Population Decline in Europe’s Urban and Rural Areas, SpringerBriefs in Population Studies. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 29–37.

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 Science Research.

Blog post

Andrews, R., 2016. Earth Used To Have More Than Two Magnetic Poles [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/environment/earth-used-have-more-two-magnetic-poles/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1983. New or Renovated Warehouse Space Provided Under Extended Storage Agreements (No. RCED-84-49). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Vianna, M.H., 2015. An exploration of the factors that influence Brazilian students’ fluency of English: A case study (Doctoral dissertation). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Baker, L., 2005. Spurring Urban Growth in Vancouver, One Family at a Time. New York Times 1111.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Batty, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Batty, 2006; Dutton and Lambeck, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Dutton and Lambeck, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Reiter et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Social Science Research
Abbreviation	Soc. Sci. Res.
ISSN (print)	0049-089X
Scope	Education Sociology and Political Science