How to format your references using the The Computer Games Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Computer Games Journal. 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

Lemaire, P. (2006). Developmental biology. How many ways to make a chordate? Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5777), 1145–1146.

A journal article with 2 authors

Calais, E., & Stein, S. (2009). Time-variable deformation in the New Madrid seismic zone. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5920), 1442.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rutberg, R. L., Hemming, S. R., & Goldstein, S. L. (2000). Reduced North Atlantic Deep Water flux to the glacial Southern Ocean inferred from neodymium isotope ratios. Nature, 405(6789), 935–938.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Roch, N., Florens, S., Bouchiat, V., Wernsdorfer, W., & Balestro, F. (2008). Quantum phase transition in a single-molecule quantum dot. Nature, 453(7195), 633–637.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chassaing, R. (2004). Digital Signal Processing and Applications with the C6713 and C6416 DSK. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Mohr, B., Träff, J. L., Worringen, J., & Dongarra, J. (Eds.). (2006). Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface: 13th European PVM/MPI User’s Group Meeting Bonn, Germany, September 17-20, 2006 Proceedings (Vol. 4192). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Andersen, M. L., & Baumans, V. (2016). Euthanasia. In M. L. Andersen & S. Tufik (Eds.), Rodent Model as Tools in Ethical Biomedical Research (pp. 39–49). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Computer Games Journal.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, November 13). Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children? Five Reasons Why Drug Panics Are Counterproductive. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/won-t-somebody-think-children-five-reasons-why-drug-panics-are-counterproductive/. 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. (1993). TQM Implementation at NASA (No. GGD-93-28R). 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

Crane, C. C. (2017). A Qualitative Study on the Preferred Working Environment of Southern California Secondary Teachers with Experience in Both a District Traditional School and a District Charter School (Doctoral dissertation). Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

Leland, J. (2016, August 19). Starring in Someone Else’s Film. New York Times, p. MB4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lemaire 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Calais and Stein 2009; Lemaire 2006).

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

Two authors: (Calais and Stein 2009)
Three or more authors: (Roch et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Computer Games Journal
ISSN (online)	2052-773X
Scope

Research and Writing Guides