How to format your references using the Scandinavian Political Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Scandinavian Political Studies. 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

Govindan, R. 2014. ‘Cancer. Attack of the clones’, Science (New York, N.Y.) 346, 169–70.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gallouzi, I. E. & Steitz, J. A. 2001. ‘Delineation of mRNA export pathways by the use of cell-permeable peptides’, Science (New York, N.Y.) 294, 1895–901.

A journal article with 3 authors

Babaev, E., Sudbø, A. & Ashcroft, N. W. 2004. ‘A superconductor to superfluid phase transition in liquid metallic hydrogen’, Nature 431, 666–8.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Holden, L. G. et al. 2008. ‘Crystal structure of the anti-viral APOBEC3G catalytic domain and functional implications’, Nature 456, 121–4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bowen, C. 2015. Children’s Speech Sound Disorders. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Dick, A. J. 2016. Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States: A Critical Perspective on Evidence-Based Reform. Rich, W. & Waters, T., eds., New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US.

A chapter in an edited book

Fan, Y. & Yin, Y. 2012. ‘Differentiated Time-Frequency Characteristics Based Real-Time Motion Decoding for Lower Extremity Rehabilitation Exoskeleton Robot’, in Su, C.-Y., Rakheja, S., & Liu, H., eds. Intelligent Robotics and Applications: 5th International Conference, ICIRA 2012, Montreal, Canada, October 3-5, 2012, Proceedings, Part II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Scandinavian Political Studies.

Blog post

Fang, J. 2014. ‘NASA’s LADEE Has Crashed Into the Moon’, IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/space/nasas-ladee-has-crashed-moon/ [Accessed October 30, 2018].

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 1992. The Civil Division, 1956-1972: Interview With Gregory J. Ahart, Henry Eschwege, and Victor L. Lowe. Washington, DC: 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

Bankapura, S. 2016. Packet adaptive routing in communication network. Doctoral dissertation. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Murphy, M. J. O. & Patel, S. 2016. ‘Because I Was a Girl’, New York Times, A18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Govindan 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Govindan 2014; Gallouzi & Steitz 2001).

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

Two authors: (Gallouzi & Steitz 2001)
Three or more authors: (Holden et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Scandinavian Political Studies
Abbreviation	Scan. Polit. Stud.
ISSN (print)	0080-6757
ISSN (online)	1467-9477
Scope	Sociology and Political Science