How to format your references using the The British Journal of Sociology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The British Journal of Sociology. 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

Nurse, P. 2003 ‘Systems biology: understanding cells’, Nature 424(6951): p.883.

A journal article with 2 authors

Thurner, S. and Poledna, S. 2013 ‘DebtRank-transparency: controlling systemic risk in financial networks’, Scientific reports 3: p.1888.

A journal article with 3 authors

Humanes-Valera, D., Foffani, G. and Aguilar, J. 2014 ‘Increased cortical responses to forepaw stimuli immediately after peripheral deafferentation of hindpaw inputs’, Scientific reports 4: p.7278.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Klein, D., Benchellal, M., Kleff, V., Jakob, H.G. and Ergün, S. 2013 ‘Hox genes are involved in vascular wall-resident multipotent stem cell differentiation into smooth muscle cells’, Scientific reports 3: p.2178.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Benslama, M., Boucenna, M.L. and Batatia, H. 2015 Ad Hoc Networks Telecommunications and Game Theory, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Obdržálek, D. and Gottscheber, A. (eds) 2011 Research and Education in Robotics - EUROBOT 2010: International Conference, Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland, May 27-30, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Sokolov, A.V. 2010 ‘Applications of Coherent Raman Scattering’ in T. J. Hall, S. V. Gaponenko, and S. A. Paredes (eds) Extreme Photonics & Applications, NATO Science for Peace and Security Series B: Physics and Biophysics. 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 The British Journal of Sociology.

Blog post

Luntz, S. 2014 ‘Five Second Rule More than Wishful Thinking?’, IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/five-second-rule-more-wishful-thinking/ [Accessed October 30, 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 1994 Federal Judicial Space Follow-up, 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

Becker, L.A. 2010 Noncredit to credit transitions: The role of cultural capital and habitus for adult immigrant learners in the community college. Doctoral dissertation. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Rothenberg, B. 2017 ‘Murray Pounces After del Potro’s First-Set Stumble’, New York Times: p.SP6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Nurse 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Nurse 2003; Thurner and Poledna 2013).

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

Two authors: (Thurner and Poledna 2013)
Three authors: (Humanes-Valera, Foffani and Aguilar 2014)
4 or more authors: (Klein et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	The British Journal of Sociology
Abbreviation	Br. J. Sociol.
ISSN (print)	0007-1315
ISSN (online)	1468-4446
Scope	Sociology and Political Science