How to format your references using the Thinking Skills and Creativity citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Thinking Skills and Creativity. 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
Novembre, J. (2015). Human evolution: ancient DNA steps into the language debate. Nature, 522(7555), 164–165.
A journal article with 2 authors
Mattick, J. S., & Gagen, M. J. (2005). Mathematics/computation. Accelerating networks. Science (New York, N.Y.), 307(5711), 856–858.
A journal article with 3 authors
Nava, E., Steiger, T., & Röder, B. (2014). Both developmental and adult vision shape body representations. Scientific Reports, 4, 6622.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Hosten, O., Rakher, M. T., Barreiro, J. T., Peters, N. A., & Kwiat, P. G. (2006). Counterfactual quantum computation through quantum interrogation. Nature, 439(7079), 949–952.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Mackevičius, V. (2014). Integral and Measure. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Bremer, E. G., Hakenberg, J., Han, E.-H. (sam), Berrar, D., & Dubitzky, W. (Eds.). (2006). Knowledge Discovery in Life Science Literature: PAKDD 2006 International Workshop, KDLL 2006, Singapore, April 9, 2006. Proceedings (Vol. 3886). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Richards, H., & Swanger, J. (2009). Culture Change: A Practical Method with a Theoretical Basis. In J. de Rivera (Ed.), Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace (pp. 57–70). 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 Thinking Skills and Creativity.

Blog post
Davis, J. (2017, March 17). Researchers Find A Way To Reverse Drug Resistance In Tuberculosis. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/researchers-find-a-way-to-reverse-drug-resistance-in-tuberculosis/

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. (2012). Department of Homeland Security: Oversight and Coordination of Research and Development Should Be Strengthened (GAO-12-837). 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
Horvath, C. P. (2012). Comparison of waste heat driven and electrically driven cooling systems for a high ambient temperature, off-grid application [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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
Feeney, K. (2009, October 11). If It’s on a Bun, It’s a Burger. New York Times, NJ13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Novembre, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Mattick & Gagen, 2005; Novembre, 2015).

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

  • Two authors: (Mattick & Gagen, 2005)
  • Three authors: (Nava et al., 2014)
  • 6 or more authors: (Hosten et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleThinking Skills and Creativity
AbbreviationThink. Skills Creat.
ISSN (print)1871-1871
ScopeEducation

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