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PSCI 3300: Introduction to Political Research

Library research guide for PSCI 2300

STYLE MANUAL FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Reference List and Citing Your Sources

The APSA (American Political Science Association) manual remains the standard style guide in the Political Science discipline upon which students, junior faculty members, and well-established scholars authoring manuscripts, as well as editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders, can rely. APSA style, in most instances, follows guidelines set forth in the Chicago Manual of Style17th edition (CMS). Throughout this companion website, CMS citation numbers are included in parentheses, when appropriate, to refer readers to specific sections of CMS’s 17th edition.

The 2018 revision broadens the scope of the manual, by including style requirements for all four APSA membership-wide academic journals: American Political Science Review (APSR), PS: Political Science & Politics (PS), Perspectives on Politics (PoP), and the Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE), as well as 24 APSA organized section journals. The 2018 revision also embraces a decade’s worth of changes to the academic publishing world. A few of these changes include: manuscript tracking systems, online-only publications, open-access journals, social media, active-citation techniques, data archives, government research funding requirements, and more. While this manual can and should be used as an umbrella guide, authors are responsible for reviewing and following the specific requirements laid out by each journal prior to submission. Individual style requirements for each journal can be found on the APSA website.

Other Citation Methods

There are several citations to choose from. APA, MLA or Chicago Style Guide are the most common; however, each discipline (and professor) has a preferred style so it is best to confirm the style expected for your class. 

APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (6th ed., 2nd printing).

MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook (8th ed.), offers examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) covers a variety of topics from manuscript preparation and publication to grammar, usage, and documentation and has been lovingly called the “editors’ bible.” The material in this resource focuses primarily on one of the two CMS documentation styles: the Notes-Bibliography System (NB), which is used by those in literature, history, and the arts. The other documentation style, the Author-Date System, is nearly identical in content but slightly different in form and is preferred in the social/sciences.

Copyright © University of North Texas. Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this library guide is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Suggested citation for citing this guide when adapting it:

This work is a derivative of "PSCI 3300: Introduction to Political Research", created by [author name if apparent] and © University of North Texas, used under CC BY-NC 4.0 International.

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