How to format your references using the Sociological Theory citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Sociological Theory. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Loder, N. 2000. “UK Panel Calls for More Cuts to Carbon Dioxide Emission.” Nature 405(6789):873–74.
A journal article with 2 authors
Yang, Xiankun, and Xixi Lu. 2014. “Drastic Change in China’s Lakes and Reservoirs over the Past Decades.” Scientific Reports 4:6041.
A journal article with 3 authors
Sun, Xin, Francesca V. Mariani, and Gail R. Martin. 2002. “Functions of FGF Signalling from the Apical Ectodermal Ridge in Limb Development.” Nature 418(6897):501–8.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Prusinkiewicz, Przemyslaw, Yvette Erasmus, Brendan Lane, Lawrence D. Harder, and Enrico Coen. 2007. “Evolution and Development of Inflorescence Architectures.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 316(5830):1452–56.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Lakshminarayana, Budugur. 2007. Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer of Turbomachinery. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Vaamonde, Diana, Stefan S. du Plessis, and Ashok Agarwal, eds. 2016. Exercise and Human Reproduction: Induced Fertility Disorders and Possible Therapies. New York, NY: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Bianchi, Marco, Mauro Draoli, and Giorgio Gambosi. 2011. “An Innovative Approach to the Development of E-Government Search Services.” Pp. 41–55 in Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective: Second International Conference, EGOVIS 2011, Toulouse, France, August 29 – September 2, 2011. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, edited by K. N. Andersen, E. Francesconi, Å. Grönlund, and T. M. van Engers. 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 Sociological Theory.

Blog post
Luntz, Stephen. 2015. “Stephen Fry Gets His Own Asteroid.” IFLScience. Retrieved October 30, 2018 (https://www.iflscience.com/space/stephen-fry-gets-his-own-asteroid/).

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. 1980. Areas Needing Improvement in the Adult Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program. CED-80-138. 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
Tu, Kai-Han. 2017. “Structural and Functional Analysis of Apolipoprotein E3/E4 Hybrid.” 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
Kishkovsky, Sophia. 2011. “Former Arsenal Houses Museum in Kiev, Ukraine.” New York Times, October 2, TR2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Loder 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Loder 2000; Yang and Lu 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Yang and Lu 2014)
  • Three authors: (Sun, Mariani, and Martin 2002)
  • 4 or more authors: (Prusinkiewicz et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal titleSociological Theory
ISSN (print)0735-2751
ScopeSociology and Political Science

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