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

Debe, M.K., 2012. Electrocatalyst approaches and challenges for automotive fuel cells. Nature 486, 43–51.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pieters, J., Ploegh, H., 2003. Microbiology. Chemical warfare and mycobacterial defense. Science 302, 1900–1902.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ravishankara, A.R., Daniel, J.S., Portmann, R.W., 2009. Nitrous oxide (N2O): the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted in the 21st century. Science 326, 123–125.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Caggiano, V., Fogassi, L., Rizzolatti, G., Thier, P., Casile, A., 2009. Mirror neurons differentially encode the peripersonal and extrapersonal space of monkeys. Science 324, 403–406.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stamp, M., 2011. Information Security. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Riele, K. te, Gorur, R. (Eds.), 2015. Interrogating Conceptions of “Vulnerable Youth” in Theory, Policy and Practice, Innovations and Controversies: Interrogating Educational Change. SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

A chapter in an edited book

Dimov, I., Georgieva, R., Todorov, V., 2015. Balancing of Systematic and Stochastic Errors in Monte Carlo Algorithms for Integral Equations, in: Dimov, I., Fidanova, S., Lirkov, I. (Eds.), Numerical Methods and Applications: 8th International Conference, NMA 2014, Borovets, Bulgaria, August 20-24, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 44–51.

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

Luntz, S., 2016. Smallpox Was A Newly Emerging Disease When It Swept The World [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1975. Federal Guidance Needed if Halfway Houses Are To Be a Viable Alternative to Prison (No. GGD-75-70). 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

Pettengill, J.B., 2010. Elucidating the macro- and micro-evolutionary relationships of the federally listed endangered species Agalinis acuta (Orobanchaceae) (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Oestreich, J.R., 2017. Getting Inside the Mind of Bach. New York Times C6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Debe, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Debe, 2012; Pieters and Ploegh, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Pieters and Ploegh, 2003)
Three or more authors: (Caggiano et al., 2009)

About the journal

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