How to format your references using the Government Information Quarterly citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Government Information Quarterly. 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

Baulcombe, D. (2004). RNA silencing in plants. Nature, 431(7006), 356–363.

A journal article with 2 authors

Greene, C. H., & Pershing, A. J. (2007). Oceans. Climate drives sea change. Science (New York, N.Y.), 315(5815), 1084–1085.

A journal article with 3 authors

Collins, F. S., Morgan, M., & Patrinos, A. (2003). The Human Genome Project: lessons from large-scale biology. Science (New York, N.Y.), 300(5617), 286–290.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Tsai, T. Y.-C., Choi, Y. S., Ma, W., Pomerening, J. R., Tang, C., & Ferrell, J. E., Jr. (2008). Robust, tunable biological oscillations from interlinked positive and negative feedback loops. Science (New York, N.Y.), 321(5885), 126–129.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lundberg, U., & Cooper, C. L. (2010). The Science of Occupational Health. Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Gong, Z., Luo, X., Chen, J., Lei, J., & Wang, F. L. (Eds.). (2011). Web Information Systems and Mining: International Conference, WISM 2011, Taiyuan, China, September 24-25, 2011, Proceedings, Part II (Vol. 6988). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Gruber, H., & Holzer, M. (2008). Finite Automata, Digraph Connectivity, and Regular Expression Size. In L. Aceto, I. Damgård, L. A. Goldberg, M. M. Halldórsson, A. Ingólfsdóttir, & I. Walukiewicz (Eds.), Automata, Languages and Programming: 35th International Colloquium, ICALP 2008, Reykjavik, Iceland, July 7-11, 2008, Proceedings, Part II (pp. 39–50). 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 Government Information Quarterly.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, December 18). After 8 Years In Orbit, The Venus Express Is Headed Towards A Fiery Death. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/after-8-years-orbit-venus-express-headed-towards-fiery-death/

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. (2006). Critical Infrastructure Protection: Progress Coordinating Government and Private Sector Efforts Varies by Sectors’ Characteristics (GAO-07-39). 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

Caballero Suarez, O. L. (2008). Effects of ion correlations in high density plasmas: Neutrino scattering and transport properties in supernovae and neutron star crusts [Doctoral dissertation]. Indiana 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

Chapman, M. M. (2014, August 9). Bankruptcy Judge Gets View of Detroit Outside Courtroom. New York Times, A13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Baulcombe, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Baulcombe, 2004; Greene & Pershing, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Greene & Pershing, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Tsai et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Government Information Quarterly
Abbreviation	Gov. Inf. Q.
ISSN (print)	0740-624X
Scope	Law Library and Information Sciences Sociology and Political Science