How to format your references using the American Political Science Review citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Political Science Review (APSR). 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Mervis, Jeffrey. 2015. “Behind the Numbers. Salaries Pump up Biomedical Inflation.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 349 (6245): 225.

A journal article with 2 authors

VijayRaghavan, K., and Michael Bate. 2010. “Retrospective. Veronica Rodrigues (1953-2010).” Science (New York, N.Y.) 330 (6010): 1493.

A journal article with 3 authors

Davidson, E. A., S. E. Trumbore, and R. Amundson. 2000. “Soil Warming and Organic Carbon Content.” Nature 408 (6814): 789–90.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Petta, J. R., A. C. Johnson, J. M. Taylor, et al. 2005. “Coherent Manipulation of Coupled Electron Spins in Semiconductor Quantum Dots.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309 (5744): 2180–84.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Center for Chemical Process Safety. 1998. Guidelines for Design Solutions for Process Equipment Failures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Karabulut, Yücel, John Mitchell, Peter Herrmann, and Christian Damsgaard Jensen, eds. 2008. Trust Management II: Proceedings of IFIPTM 2008: Joint iTrust and PST Conferences on Privacy, Trust Management and Security, June 18-20, 2008, Trondheim, Norway. Vol. 263. IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Agrawal, Anju, and Krishna Gopal. 2013. “Challenges of Fish Diversity in Polluted Water.” In Biomonitoring of Water and Waste Water, edited by Krishna Gopal. Springer India.

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 American Political Science Review.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2014. “Light Therapy Could One Day Be Used To Treat Epilepsy.” IFLScience, IFLScience, November 20. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/light-therapy-could-one-day-be-used-treat-epilepsy/.

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. 1976. Civil Aviation Research and Development Programs and Facilities. PSAD-76-146. 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

Coleman, Michael J. 2010. “Surface Accuracy Analysis and Mathematical Modeling of Deployable Large Aperture Elastic Antenna Reflectors.” Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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

GEORGE GENE GUSTINES; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF. 2010. “Man Of Steel Lands On the iPhone.” New York Times, June 24.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mervis 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Mervis 2015; VijayRaghavan and Bate 2010).

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

Two authors: (VijayRaghavan and Bate 2010)
Three authors: (Davidson et al. 2000)
4 or more authors: (Petta et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Political Science Review
Abbreviation	Am. Polit. Sci. Rev.
ISSN (print)	0003-0554
ISSN (online)	1537-5943
Scope	Sociology and Political Science Political Science and International Relations