How to format your references using the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Eyre-Walker, A. (2006). Evolution. Size does not matter for mitochondrial DNA. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5773), 537–538.

A journal article with 2 authors

Shohat, S., & Shifman, S. (2014). Bias towards large genes in autism. Nature, 512(7512), E1-2.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rosin-Arbesfeld, R., Townsley, F., & Bienz, M. (2000). The APC tumour suppressor has a nuclear export function. Nature, 406(6799), 1009–1012.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Merkel, T. C., Freeman, B. D., Spontak, R. J., He, Z., Pinnau, I., Meakin, P., & Hill, A. J. (2002). Ultrapermeable, reverse-selective nanocomposite membranes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 296(5567), 519–522.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lindahl, D. (2007). Emerging Real Estate Markets. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Gallud, J. A., Tesoriero, R., & Penichet, V. M. R. (Eds.). (2011). Distributed User Interfaces: Designing Interfaces for the Distributed Ecosystem. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kemp, R., Palmer, N., Kielmann, T., & Bal, H. (2012). Energy Efficient Information Monitoring Applications on Smartphones through Communication Offloading. In J. Y. Zhang, J. Wilkiewicz, & A. Nahapetian (Eds.), Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services: Third International Conference, MobiCASE 2011, Los Angeles, CA, USA, October 24-27, 2011. Revised Selected Papers (pp. 60–79). 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 Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016, November 18). Astronomers Have Found The Roundest Object In The Universe. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-have-found-the-roundest-object-in-the-universe/

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. (1986). Computer Systems: Continued Oversight Crucial for Air Force’s Requirements Data Bank (IMTEC-87-6). 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

Cady, S. C. (2013). Successful student goal completion: A community college case study [Doctoral dissertation]. Capella 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

Lipton, E., Barringer, F., & Walsh, M. W. (2012, November 13). Flood Insurance, Already Fragile, Faces New Stress. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Eyre-Walker, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Eyre-Walker, 2006; Shohat & Shifman, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Shohat & Shifman, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Merkel et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Psychology of Religion and Spirituality
Abbreviation	Psycholog. Relig. Spiritual.
ISSN (print)	1941-1022
ISSN (online)	1943-1562
Scope	Religious studies Applied Psychology Social Psychology