How to format your references using the Sociology citation style

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

Sargent M (2008) Obituary: Willis E. Lamb Jr (1913-2008). Nature 453(7197): 867.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yang L and Huang HW (2002) Observation of a membrane fusion intermediate structure. Science (New York, N.Y.) 297(5588): 1877–1879.

A journal article with 3 authors

Foote AD, Osborne RW and Hoelzel AR (2004) Environment: whale-call response to masking boat noise. Nature 428(6986): 910.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Nee S, Colegrave N, West SA, et al. (2005) The illusion of invariant quantities in life histories. Science (New York, N.Y.) 309(5738): 1236–1239.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Speight JG (2014) Handbook of Petroleum Product Analysis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Gleizes M-P, Omicini A and Zambonelli F (eds) (2005) Engineering Societies in the Agents World V: 5th International Workshop, ESAW 2004, Toulouse, France, October 20-22, 2004. Revised Selected and Invited Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

de Azevedo LH, Emberson RM, Esteca F de CN, et al. (2015) Macrochelid Mites (Mesostigmata: Macrochelidae) as Biological Control Agents. In: Carrillo D, de Moraes GJ, and Peña JE (eds) Prospects for Biological Control of Plant Feeding Mites and Other Harmful Organisms. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 103–132.

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 Sociology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) ESPN Suspends Reporter For Defending Evolution on Twitter. IFLScience.

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 (1996) Supercomputers. NSIAD-97-54R, 16 December. 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

Gonzalez ER (2015) Technology and adiposity: Effects of television time, video or computer game time, and computer use on body fat among Latino youth. 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

Stewart JB (2016) Hedge Fund Math: Heads or Tails, They Win. New York Times, 22 December.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sargent, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Sargent, 2008; Yang and Huang, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Yang and Huang, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Nee et al., 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Sociology
Abbreviation	Sociology
ISSN (print)	0038-0385
ISSN (online)	1469-8684
Scope	Sociology and Political Science