How to format your references using the Utilities Policy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Utilities Policy. 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
Shlesinger, M.F., 2000. Statistical mechanics. Exploring phase space. Nature 405, 135, 137.
A journal article with 2 authors
Kaspi, Y., Schneider, T., 2011. Winter cold of eastern continental boundaries induced by warm ocean waters. Nature 471, 621–624.
A journal article with 3 authors
Nussbaumer, A.D., Fisher, C.R., Bright, M., 2006. Horizontal endosymbiont transmission in hydrothermal vent tubeworms. Nature 441, 345–348.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Forterre, Y., Skotheim, J.M., Dumais, J., Mahadevan, L., 2005. How the Venus flytrap snaps. Nature 433, 421–425.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Bma, 2013. Everyday Medical Ethics and Law. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.
An edited book
Gutkin, B., Ahmed, S.H. (Eds.), 2012. Computational Neuroscience of Drug Addiction, 1st ed, Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY.
A chapter in an edited book
Waluszewski, A., 2013. Contemporary Research and Innovation Policy: A Double Disservice?, in: Rider, S., Hasselberg, Y., Waluszewski, A. (Eds.), Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market: The Breakdown of Scientific Thought, Higher Education Dynamics. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 71–95.

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 Utilities Policy.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2014. Scientists Create Functioning Whole Organ From Cells [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1977. Mission Budgeting: Discussion and Illustration of the Concept in Research and Development Programs (No. PSAD-77-124). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Allen, M.W., 2017. Popular Culture and War in the Vietnam Era (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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
Kelly, M., 1992. THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: The Democrats; Clinton’s Staff Sees Campaign As a Real War. New York Times A16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Shlesinger, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kaspi and Schneider, 2011; Shlesinger, 2000).

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

  • Two authors: (Kaspi and Schneider, 2011)
  • Three or more authors: (Forterre et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleUtilities Policy
ISSN (print)0957-1787
ScopeBusiness and International Management
Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Development
Law
Sociology and Political Science

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