How to format your references using the Mathematical Social Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mathematical Social Sciences. 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
Judson, H.F., 2001. Talking about the genome. Nature 409, 769.
A journal article with 2 authors
Emery, N.J., Clayton, N.S., 2001. Effects of experience and social context on prospective caching strategies by scrub jays. Nature 414, 443–446.
A journal article with 3 authors
Croxall, J.P., Trathan, P.N., Murphy, E.J., 2002. Environmental change and Antarctic seabird populations. Science 297, 1510–1514.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Vershinin, M., Misra, S., Ono, S., Abe, Y., Ando, Y., Yazdani, A., 2004. Local ordering in the pseudogap state of the high-Tc superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O(8+delta). Science 303, 1995–1998.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Windom, C.A., Sr., Gaidhani, H., Fontana, A., 2010. Virtualizing. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.
An edited book
Jornitz, M.W. (Ed.), 2006. Sterile Filtration, Advances in Biochemical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Mycroft, A., Voigt, J., 2013. Notions of Aliasing and Ownership, in: Clarke, D., Noble, J., Wrigstad, T. (Eds.), Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming. Types, Analysis and Verification, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 59–83.

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 Mathematical Social Sciences.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2015. Exposed: The Private Lives Of Hairy-Chested ‘Hoff Crabs’ [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. Status of the Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 Project (No. PSAD-77-103). 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
Duran, P.E., 2010. Factors and prevention strategies to fight childhood obesity (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Egan, J., Saunders, G., 2015. Choose Your Own Adventure. New York Times MM74.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Judson, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Emery and Clayton, 2001; Judson, 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Emery and Clayton, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Vershinin et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal titleMathematical Social Sciences
AbbreviationMath. Soc. Sci.
ISSN (print)0165-4896
ScopeStatistics, Probability and Uncertainty
General Psychology
General Social Sciences
Sociology and Political Science

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