How to format your references using the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 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 reference managers.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Lawler, A. (2000). BROOKHAVEN LAB: Forbes Loses in Fallout From Reactor Fight. Science (New York, N.Y.), 289(5487), 2021b.
A journal article with 2 authors
Hammond, E. M., & Giaccia, A. J. (2002). Antiangiogenic therapy and p53. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5581), 471; discussion 471.
A journal article with 3 authors
Chandra, P., Coleman, P., & Flint, R. (2013). Hastatic order in the heavy-fermion compound URu2Si2. Nature, 493(7434), 621–626.
A journal article with 21 or more authors
Cristescu, R., Mogg, R., Ayers, M., Albright, A., Murphy, E., Yearley, J., Sher, X., Liu, X. Q., Lu, H., Nebozhyn, M., Zhang, C., Lunceford, J. K., Joe, A., Cheng, J., Webber, A. L., Ibrahim, N., Plimack, E. R., Ott, P. A., Seiwert, T. Y., … Kaufman, D. (2018). Pan-tumor genomic biomarkers for PD-1 checkpoint blockade-based immunotherapy. Science (New York, N.Y.), 362(6411).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Asif, S. Z. (2010). Next Generation Mobile Communications Ecosystem. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Hinkson, G. (2009). Foundation Fireworks CS4 (C. Erskine, M. Heerema, C. Mallott, M. Keefe, H. Griffith, C. Andres, D. Pundick, S. Anglin, M. Beckner, E. Buckingham, T. Campbell, G. Cornell, J. Gennick, J. Hassell, M. Lowman, M. Moodie, D. Parkes, J. Pepper, F. Pohlmann, … L. Cheu, Eds.). Apress.
A chapter in an edited book
Hazelrigg, G. A. (2009). The Mathematics of Prediction. In N. R. S. Raghavan & J. A. Cafeo (Eds.), Product Research: The Art and Science Behind Successful Product Launches (pp. 93–111). Springer Netherlands.

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 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2013, November 1). A patient in a vegetative state has been shown to ‘pay attention’ to sounds. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/patient-vegetative-state-has-been-shown-‘pay-attention-sounds/

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. (2011). Small Business Innovation Research: SBA Should Work with Agencies to Improve the Data Available for Program Evaluation (GAO-11-698). 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
Bentley, K. J. (2016). Modern Public Market to Revitalize a Small Community [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
Shear, M. D. (2017, August 1). In Trump’s Silence, Pence Takes a Swipe at Russia. New York Times, A8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lawler, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Hammond & Giaccia, 2002; Lawler, 2000).

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

  • Two authors: (Hammond & Giaccia, 2002)
  • Three or more authors: (Cristescu et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournal of Personality and Social Psychology
AbbreviationJ. Pers. Soc. Psychol.
ISSN (print)0022-3514
ISSN (online)1939-1315
ScopeSocial Psychology
Sociology and Political Science

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