How to format your references using the Synthese citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Synthese. 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

Reichhardt, T. (2003). NASA: trawling through the wreckage. Nature, 426(6968), 754–755.

A journal article with 2 authors

Akbalik, G., & Schuman, E. M. (2014). Molecular biology. mRNA, live and unmasked. Science (New York, N.Y.), 343(6169), 375–376.

A journal article with 3 authors

Koskinen, T. T., Aylward, A. D., & Miller, S. (2007). A stability limit for the atmospheres of giant extrasolar planets. Nature, 450(7171), 845–848.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Ferrón, S. R., Charalambous, M., Radford, E., McEwen, K., Wildner, H., Hind, E., et al. (2011). Postnatal loss of Dlk1 imprinting in stem cells and niche astrocytes regulates neurogenesis. Nature, 475(7356), 381–385.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Golding, P. (2005). Next Generation Wireless Applications. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Jia, Y., Du, J., Li, H., & Zhang, W. (Eds.). (2016). Proceedings of the 2015 Chinese Intelligent Systems Conference: Volume 1 (1st ed. 2016.). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Campbell, M., & Zegwaard, K. E. (2015). Developing Critical Moral Agency Through Workplace Engagement. In M. Kennedy, S. Billett, S. Gherardi, & L. Grealish (Eds.), Practice-based Learning in Higher Education: Jostling Cultures (pp. 47–64). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Synthese.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2017, January 25). Stick Man Drawing Moves Around When Splashed With Water. IFLScience. IFLScience. 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. (2013). Small Business Innovation Research: Data Rights Protections (No. GAO-14-116R). 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

Webb, C. T. (2009). “The mirroring that binds into freedom”: Stevens, Jeffers, Heidegger and the inhuman (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

Wilson, M. (2017, May 22). A Gadget Is Favored by Fingers Both Restless and Sticky. New York Times, p. A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Reichhardt 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Akbalik and Schuman 2014; Reichhardt 2003).

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

Two authors: (Akbalik and Schuman 2014)
Three or more authors: (Ferrón et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Synthese
Abbreviation	Synthese
ISSN (print)	0039-7857
ISSN (online)	1573-0964
Scope	Philosophy General Social Sciences