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:

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

Butler, D. (2000). Biology back issues free as publishers walk highwire. Nature, 404(6774), 117.

A journal article with 2 authors

Liu, C.-Y., & Bard, A. J. (2002). Pressure-induced insulator conductor transition in a photoconducting organic liquid-crystal film. Nature, 418(6894), 162–164.

A journal article with 3 authors

Li, W., Cochell, T., & Manthiram, A. (2013). Activation of aluminum as an effective reducing agent by pitting corrosion for wet-chemical synthesis. Scientific Reports, 3, 1229.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Osama, A., Najam, A., Kassim-Lakha, S., Zulfiqar Gilani, S., & King, C. (2009). Pakistan’s reform experiment. Nature, 461(7260), 38–39.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Denham, B. E. (2016). Categorical Statistics for Communication Research. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Ritsner, M. S. (Ed.). (2009). The Handbook of Neuropsychiatric Biomarkers, Endophenotypes and Genes: Molecular Genetic and Genomic Markers. Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Li, D., Cao, J., Liu, M., & Zheng, Y. (2007). K-Connected Target Coverage Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks. In A. Dress, Y. Xu, & B. Zhu (Eds.), Combinatorial Optimization and Applications: First International Conference, COCOA 2007, Xi’an, China, August 14-16, 2007. Proceedings (pp. 20–31). 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

Andrew, E. (2015, March 5). Science Debunks Fad Autism Theories, But That Doesn’t Dissuade Believers. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (1995). Tongass Timber Reform Act: Implementation of the Act’s Contract Modification Requirements (RCED-95-2). 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

Plumer, D. R. (2010). The relationship between earned value management metrics and customer satisfaction [Doctoral dissertation]. Northcentral University.

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

(nyt), S. K. (2004, June 11). World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Arrests In 2 Bombings. New York Times, A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Butler, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Butler, 2000; Liu & Bard, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Liu & Bard, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Osama et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Thinking Skills and Creativity
Abbreviation	Think. Skills Creat.
ISSN (print)	1871-1871
Scope	Education