Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Journal Style for Final Manuscript Submission
For purposes of manuscript review, only the much less exacting Minimum Standard need be met. The requirements of Journal Style are not imposed on authors until a paper has been conditionally accepted for publication (unconditional acceptance will follow on submission of a final manuscript that conforms to journal style). There are guidelines concerning the technical requirements for the final manuscript files, as well as requirements on content and style. The special conventions around citations and references have their own section.
Please take care to follow these instructions carefully; much grief can be avoided during the production process if authors prepare their manuscripts well. It also minimizes the lag between acceptance and the appearance of your finished article online and in print.
Technical Requirements
A final manuscript must be supplied in a format which the editorial office and our publisher’s typesetters can handle. Most authors will find it convenient to prepare their manuscript in the .docx format of up-to-date versions of Microsoft Word. The editorial office is also happy to receive plain text submissions written in Pandoc-flavoured Markdown. These are the only acceptable formats at this stage of the process. The content must conform to the guidelines below.
For the convenience of authors, we provide a Word template file which contains the document styles and formatting elements used in the production of the Journal. Your file should, so far as possible, forego use of document styles beyond the minimum needed. Please do not add any additional styles, or modify the existing styles. There is some dummy content in the template file to illustrate the uses of the various styles; please delete this content and replace it with your own. Please ensure that your final manuscript is clean (i.e., with no ‘comments’ or ‘changes tracked’, and no field codes present).
Authors are encouraged to prepare their manuscripts directly in Pandoc Markdown. The syntax is straightforward and relatively expressive, covering most features we need in publishing the Journal.Authors whose original submission was written in LaTeX are encouraged to use Pandoc to produce a suitable file; the conversion process works best with ‘vanilla’ LaTeX, so try not to rely on recherché packages in producing your manuscript. Avoid defining new commands or making use of non-standard environments, which will likely not render correctly if at all. While LaTeX has sophisticated typesetting capabilities, our workflow means anything that cannot be represented using the much more limited capabilities of Pandoc-flavoured Markdown will not make it to the final page proofs.
Submitted documents (whether Word or Pandoc Markdown) should be self-contained as far as possible, with the exception of figures (see below for more information on figures) and possibly auxiliary bibliography files. This includes tables, which should be prepared using built-in tools and incorporated in your document. However, tables will be typeset as 'floats' to ensure efficient usage of page space, and so tables may not be typeset exactly where you incorporate them in your manuscript. Accordingly, reference to tables should be by table number. Each figure and table must have a caption and be numbered in order of apperance.
You may use built-in capabilities in Word and Markdown to manage internal cross-references to figures, tables, sections, and other numbered items. The editorial office uses the Pandoc Crossref filter to extend Pandoc's cross-reference capabilities, so please follow that syntax if including linked cross-references. (If Pandoc filters are a little too much, you may manually handle cross-reference numbering.)
Please do make use of equations/math(s) mode for any mathematics—even single variables in text.
Bibliographical information is to be supplied in the correct format. If you wisely make use of an external reference manager to manage your bibliographic matter in Word, the resulting formatted references must be supplied in your main document to the editorial office without dependencies on external databases and without embedded field codes (the easiest way to remove these from a Word document is to use Word’s ‘unlink fields’ command: select the entire document using Ctrl+A [Mac: ⌘A] and then press Ctrl+Shift+F9 [⌘⇧F9] to replace the fields with their contents). If you are supplying a Pandoc Markdown file, you have two options:
- Make use of Pandoc Markdown's built-in citation syntax, and supply with your markdown file a
.bibfile containing the full bibliographic details for all and only the items you have cited in your article. Please ensure the identifiers in the bibliography file match those you use in the text. In this case please do not include any bibliographic information in your Markdown manuscript. We will useciteprocto produce a properly styled list of references. If you use LaTeX this is almost certainly the best option, but most citation management systems, including Zotero and Mendeley, can export a.bibfile containing a selected set of references. Accordingly, this options is strongly preferred. However, if you do not use any citation manager or you cannot figure out how to export to BibTeX, please use the next option. - Alternatively, you can supply a manually formatted list of references in your Markdown manuscript, and forego use of Markdown citation syntax in favour of simply inserting correctly styled citations in your Markdown document. This has a high probability of error as citations and references may need considerable manual styling, but is technically more basic.
For purposes of comparison, please supply with your final manuscript a .pdf rendition that shows your intentions for any potentially tricky issues of typesetting. We may not be willing or able to reproduce your intended typesetting exactly, but it is an important guide for us in resolving any difficulties that emerge during copyediting and proofing.
Figures
Figures—diagrams, images, and other non-text elements—must be saved separate to text. Please do not embed figures in the manuscript file. You should however indicate roughly where the figure should occur in the manuscript by inserting the appropriate numbered figure caption, e.g.: ‘[Figure 1: A small dachshund]’. The caption should be brief but descriptive.
Please provide the highest possible quality files for your figures, at the highest available resolution. To improve the print and online display, please ensure that all figures and graphics are supplied at the appropriate resolutions listed below:
- Minimum 1200 dpi for line art;
- Minimum 600 dpi for greyscale;
- Minimum 300 dpi for colour.
Note: use of colour in figures is discouraged as colour may not render effectively in print.
Figures should be saved as TIFF, JPEG, PostScript or EPS files, to guarantee compatibility with the publisher’s systems. The publisher provides more information on how to prepare artwork. Please note: if you are preparing artwork that includes text (for example flowcharts or graphs with labelled axes, etc.), the publishers request that you use PS or EPS formats, as text from properly prepared files in those formats can be automatically extracted and made searchable.
All figures must be numbered in the order in which they appear in the manuscript (e.g. ‘Figure 1’, ‘Figure 2’). In multi-part figures, each part should be labelled (e.g. ‘Figure 1(a)’, ‘Figure 1(b)’).
The filename for a graphic should link to the figure numbering: e.g. Figure1.tiff, Figure2a.eps.
Content, Grammar, and Style
Inclusive language
Authors must avoid using terms that discriminate on the basis of a person’s race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual identity, disability status or age. Use singular they as a generic gender-neutral pronoun, and respect the pronouns of anyone you are writing about. Avoid gender-specific titles in favour of neutral alternatives such as chairperson/chair or flight attendant.
The AJP's readership is culturally and linguistically diverse, and authors should be mindful of that diversity when writing. The use of technical terms and expressions that may be unfamiliar to most competent readers of English is sometimes unavoidable in philosophical writing, but deliberate obscurity in choice of vocabulary or syntax should be avoided. A sturdy and plain style, avoiding unnecessarily ornamental constructions, is generally preferred for effective philosophical communication. Self-consciously ‘literary’ affectations should be avoided.
The structure of your manuscript
Authors should take the structure of recent articles in the printed version of the Journal as a rough guide, though for matters of detail recent print issues may not represent the conventions of this style guide.
The following general pattern must be followed in production of a final version. This is the structure adhered to in the template file referred to above.
| TITLE | |
| Author Name(s) | (Final manuscripts should be deanonymized before submission.) |
| Institutional Affiliation(s) | |
| Abstract | (N.B. As space is at a premium, the abstract must not just repeat passages from the opening of the main text.) |
| Keywords | (3 to 6 carefully chosen keywords will aid readers and maximize the chance of your article’s being found in electronic searching.) |
| Main Text | (See below for details on the structure of the main text) |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Funding Information | (Acknowledge any funding received, including funding body and project identifier.) |
| ORCID iDs | (Provide the ORCID iD for each author.) |
| References | (See below for more information of the format of references) |
| Appendices | (if needed) |
The Main Text should be divided into convenient sections with Arabic numerals for each section and decimalization for sub-sections. Section titles should be in title case (insignificant words not capitalised). For example:
1. Introduction
Some text.
2. What Does a Logical Constant Mean?
2.1 The Core Tenets of Inferential Role Semantics
Some more text.
2.2 Proof-Conditional Semantics and the Sequent Calculus
Yet more text.
Any notes should be inserted as footnotes, not endnotes.
Internal cross references should be by section, rather than page: 'as I will argue in section 3'. You may abbreviate ’section’ by ‘§’: ‘As I will argue (§5), …’.
Structure of a book review or book note
Much of the foregoing does not apply to book reviews and book notes, which should not be divided into sections and should omit much of the other apparatus of an article.
A book review/note should be titled with the book under review, in the following format:
Author Forename Surname, Book Title: Subtitle, Publisher, Year of publication, pp. length in pages (including any frontmatter), price with currency (format), ISBN.
Sara Protasi, The Philosophy of Envy, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. xv + 247, AUD141.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781316519172.
The body of the review should follow the title, following the conventions for main body text, quotations, and citations laid out elsewhere in this style guide. The one exception is that the book under review should be cited by page number or chapter number alone. Quotations from the book under review should be followed by the page number in parentheses following the quoted material; omit ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’. You may refer to chapters or sections in the book as follows: ‘In chapter 3, X argues…’; ‘The central argument of the book appears in chapters 2–4’; ‘X makes much of this observation (§3.2)’, and so on.
Following the body text, include a section headed 'References' in the format specified below. The book under review should not appear in the list of references.
The review should conclude with a block of author details in this format:
Jeanette KennettIf there are multiple authors, please include multiple author blocks in this format.
Macquarie University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0879-3215
Tables and captions
Tables should be created within your document, using the native capabilities of your chosen software (Word or Pandoc Markdown), for typographical continuity with the rest of your document. Complex tables, e.g., those that must be printed rotated because they are too wide for the page, or tables with their own footnotes, are sometimes best treated as figures. Please do try to format any complex tables in keeping with the formatting of text in the journal.
Tables and figures must be accompanied by a brief descriptive caption. It is better to be more informative, though captions should not exceed 40 words.
Tables and figure captions should be numbered, and cross-reference within the text should include the number. The caption should have the form 'Table 1: A sample table', and in text you would refer to it as follows: 'As can be seen in table 1, …'.
Spelling
The Journal's standard for spelling is Australian English, as represented in the Macquarie Dictionary. Any spellchecker should be set to Australian English. Failing that, standard British English is a close facsimile. Quotations, however, should follow the spelling of the quoted source; likewise proper names and any bibliographical data.
Historically the Journal used ‘Oxford spelling’, which became laborious because unsupported by standard spellcheck.
Acronyms are tolerated though dispreferred. Unmemorable acronyms are prohibited.
Italics
Please be judicious in the use of italics for emphasis. Readers can often be trusted to figure out which are the crucial phrases in a sentence.
There are some circumstances where the use of italics is required.
- Expressions from other languages not widespread in English should be italicised: ‘prima facie', ‘a priori’, ‘Künstlerroman’. If the expressions has been assimilated into English (as, for example, if it is pronounced according to English orthographic conventions), then it should not be italicised: ‘ersatz’, ‘ad hoc’, ‘café’.
- Novel or technical terms should be italicised when first introduced. This applies whether the expressions are used or mentioned: ‘A number m is a mixture of x and y iff there is a t (0 ≤ t ≤ 1) such that m = tx + (1 − t)y. A set of numbers is said to be convex iff whenever it contains x and y, it also contains any mixture of them’.
- Expressions that are being mentioned should generally be italicised: ‘The word rosemary derives originally from Latin’; ‘Sydney has six letters, but Sydney has 5 million residents’. Authors may choose whether to follow this convention or the convention that mentioned expressions should be enclosed in quotation marks, but be consistent within your paper.
- Italics should be used when referring to species names and legal cases: ‘Salvia rosmarinus’, ‘Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2)’.
- Italics have special uses in the list of references: see below.
Quotations
Substantial quotations (40 words or more) should be shown as a block quotation: indented without quotation marks, and including any needed closing punctuation. The citation should immediately follow, on the same line:
Building the canal in Nicaragua, the French discovered that spraying oil on the swamps is a good strategy for stopping the spread of malaria, whereas burying contaminated blankets is useless. What they discovered was true, independent of their theories, of their desire to control malaria, or of the cost of doing so. (Cartwright 1979: 420)
Other (‘inline’) quotations should be enclosed by single quotation marks.
Double quotation marks should be used only in the following ways: as inner quotation marks within single quotation marks, for example, for quotations within quotations; and to enable the exact reproduction of quoted material (that is, where the quoted author has used them).
Closing punctuation should be outside quotation marks in almost all cases: it is your clause or sentence in which the quotation occurs, so the punctuation ought to be attributable to you, not the author you are quoting.
Indicate any modifications made in a quotation by enclosing your insertions in square brackets (‘the wise [person] proportions [their] belief to the evidence’) and mark each omission with an ellipsis (‘it will not require many words to prove … that the whole dispute … has been hitherto merely verbal’).
Please double check quotations for faithfulness to the original source. Some of the most common errors detected in copyediting are inaccurate quotations and incorrect citations.
Numbers and measurements
In running text, numbers under 13 should generally be referred two by their English names, not their decimal numeral: ‘A jury consists of twelve peers of the defendant’; ‘Net zero emissions’; ‘Take five, everyone’. This includes in-text fractions: ‘Two-thirds of the class achieved a distinction‘. Larger numbers should be denoted by their numerical representation. Numbers greater than 9999 need commas separating the numeral into blocks of 3 digits for readability: so '7645', '11,345', '2,500,872', etc.
There are exceptions: numbers accompanied by a unit of measurements, currency, ratios, numbers with a decimal part, dates and times, and the presentation of statistics should always be represented as numerals regardless of magnitude:
- 7km, 8lbs, 76%.
- $100; €89.95.
-
- But consider approximations: 'This could save you thousands of dollars'. Note also that sometimes 'millions', 'billions' and the like are treated as units: 'the government budgeted 8.5 million dollars this year for the project'.
- 7 February 1987 at 8:04am.
-
- Dates do not need internal commas, nor are days represented by ordinals: NOT '7th February, 1987'.
- When referring to decades, no apostrophe: 'the 1990s'.
- Please use CE/BCE, not AD/BC.
- A staff:student ratio of 2:5 means there were 2.5 students for each member of staff.
- Two children, aged 8 and 5, also attended.
Number ranges should follow the conventions on page number ranges below.
Ordinals: use number words for ordinals up to 'twelth', numerals thereafter. Exceptions: in references (e.g., '2nd edition’); very large ordinals (‘millionth visitor’). Do not superscript the suffix: '21st'.
Further grammar and style preferences
- Use of ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’. In the main text, use ‘for example’ and ‘that is’, reserving ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ for use only in footnotes. Please punctuate ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ in the same way as their English translations: for example, ‘see, e.g., Smith 1951’. Do not italicise Latin abbreviations: ‘etc.’, not ‘etc.’; the one exception is ‘et al.’ in citations.
- Do not use semi-colons and colons interchangeably. They have distinct functions. Semi-colons function either as a form of comma when there is, in effect, a list of ideas or clauses, or as a way of contrasting one idea with another. A colon lacks that contrastive function: a colon allows one to expand upon, or to illustrate, whatever idea precedes it. (Correct: ‘It was a Gettiered belief: it was therefore true.’ Correct: ‘It was a Gettiered belief; it was not knowledge.’ Incorrect: ‘It was a Gettiered belief; it was therefore true.’)
- Use the Oxford comma: ‘it was intriguing, provocative, and false’; ‘see Smith, Lan, and Mehta (1995)’.
- No full stops between letters in initialisms; thus ‘MIT’ not ‘M.I.T.’. The same goes for names, but there spaces should be used: ‘G E Moore’. Many acronyms should be treated similarly: ‘NASA’, ‘AIDS’; but ‘Qantas’ not ‘QANTAS’. If a potentially unfamiliar abbreviation or acronym is to be used more than once in a piece, put it in brackets at first mention: so ‘Principle of Alternate Possibilitities (PAP)’.
- Do not lightly discard ‘that’ immediately following propositional attitude verbs like ‘believe’, ‘assume’, ‘suppose’, ‘know’, and the like. For example, compare ‘she believes she will do X’ with ‘she believes that she will do X’. The point extends further: compare ‘The thing I discovered’ with ‘The thing that I discovered’, or ‘It is something he takes for granted’ with ‘It is something that he takes for granted’, or ‘the fact is we do so’ with ‘the fact is that we do so’, and so on.
- Similar advice pertains to a phrase such as ‘in which’: compare ‘the way people think about the issue’ with ‘the way in which people think about the issue’.
- Do not discard the ‘of’ from phrases of the form ‘all the Xs’, say.
- Do not write a phrase of the form ‘will help A do X’ when what is meant is ‘will help A to do X’. In short, don’t lightly discard ‘to’.
- Peeves (ours):
- Do not write ‘will try and do’, for example, when ‘will try to do’ is meant.
- Do not begin a sentence with ‘Whether or not’ when what is intended is ‘Regardless of whether or not’.
- Do not use ‘the question/issue is whether’ when what is intended, more precisely, is ‘the question/issue is that of whether’ (or even ‘the question/issue is one of whether’).
- Do not use ‘That said,’ when what is intended is ‘With that said,’.
- Do not use ‘though’ when ‘although’ is correct.
Special characters
- Please use ‘smart’ quotation marks: ‘some quoted text’, not 'some quoted text' (and certainly not `some quoted text'). Be aware of the difference between an apostrophe (’), which is the same as a right single quote mark, and a prime (′); don’t use the former as a substitute for the latter, which should generally only appear in mathematical contexts.
- Be aware of the difference between angle brackets (⟨, ⟩) and less than/greater than symbols (<, >); don’t use the latter as a substitute for the former.
- Parenthetical asides—like this!—should be surrounded with unspaced em-dashes, if not enclosed in parentheses. Number ranges use unspaced en-dashes, as in ‘116–24’. Compound nouns and adjectives are joined by hyphens: ‘self-knowledge’, ‘a well-known example’.
- Please use the ellipsis symbol ‘…’ rather than sequential full-stops.
- When giving a mathematical definition, AJP prefers the use of the definition symbol ‘≝’, e.g., ‘¬A ≝ (A → ⟂)’.
- In general, please use only standard mathematical symbols that are available in the Unicode standard, rather than exotic symbols (particularly avoid any symbols you've chucked together in LaTeX math). This includes, unfortunately, the 'box arrow' counterfactual conditional symbol, which remains absent from Unicode. To make your and our life easier, please use '>' to represent a counterfactual conditional, except where ambiguity would result.
Citations and References
The AJP uses an author-date system of citations. Citations should be given in parentheses, in the text whenever possible. Footnotes should be substantive; those merely giving citation information should be avoided, and the citation incorporated into the main text.
For the convenience of authors, the AJP has created a citation style file:
https://www.zotero.org/styles/australasian-journal-of-philosophy
This file can be use with any reference manager that understands the CSL specification: this includes Zotero and Mendeley, as well as many others. You may be able to install the style from within your reference manager by simply searching for ‘Australasian Journal of Philosophy’. For those who store their bibliographic data in BibTeX/BibLaTex, Pandoc can generate a properly styled list of references, using our CSL file, that you can include in your final Word or Markdown manuscript, or you can send us a .bib file including exactly the items cited in your paper (Markdown submissions only). When sending a .bib file, please remember to include all needed bibliographic data, including DOIs for items needing them.
If you cannot use the CSL file to automatically style your citations and references, the following information will be helpful in manually bringing your bibliographic matter into conformity with journal style.
Errors in reference details, and mismatches between cited items and the list of references, are among the most common errors needing correction during copyediting, so authors are asked to pay special attention to these matters.
Citations
The date used in the references, and typically in citations, should be that of the edition used. Anachronism and absurdity (such as ‘Kant 1979’) should be minimized, where possible, by using the original date of publication in citations (for example, ‘Kant 1787’) and indicating in the References the date of the edition actually cited: e.g., ‘Kant (1787/1933)’ (see the reference format for books below). But use actual dates rather than approximate: ‘(Aristotle 1984: 198a22–5)’.
Citations should appear in the text in the following forms:
- When the citation supports a contention made in the text, the parenthetical citation should take the form ‘(author’s surname(s) year: page number(s) or other locator, if any)’.
- When the author is the subject of the sentence, and their name forms part of the sentence, the citation should include just the year and page number/other locator.
- When the cited item is itself the subject of the sentence, the parentheses should be omitted. Generally no locator would occur when citations take this form. So ‘See Lewis 1973b’ (work is the subject of the sentence) vs. ‘See the discussion by Lewis (1973a)’ (author is the subject of the sentence, the citation tells you where the discussion can be found.
The following sample text illustrates these principles (full references for these cited items are available below):
Ever since Hume attempted it (1777: §7), many philosophers have tried to understand actual causation (Armstrong 1999; Hitchcock 2007; Glynn 2009; Paul and Hall 2013). Some have tried multiple times (Lewis 1973a, 2000). Some have decided it is no more than an outmoded ‘relic’ (Russell 1913: 1); but Cartwright argues that it ‘cannot be done away with’ (1979: 419–20). Some say causation is needed for causal explanation (van Fraassen 1980: ch. 5). And some conceptions of causation have been long-neglected (Descartes 1641: 45; Aristotle 1984: 198a22–5). Weirdly, some philosophical works don’t really have causation as their main focus (Kant 1787; Belnap 1962; Langton and Lewis 1998; Le Poidevin, Simons, et al. 2009; Avigad and Zach 2020). Sometimes we really need to look in lots of different places in a text to see where they say things about causation (Lewis 1973b: 1–8, 101–7, 150–63, 199–218, 994–1234). Sometimes different authors with the same name have engaged with these sorts of questions (Lewis 1973b; 1986; 2007; Lewis, PJ 2007). See Collins, Hall, and Paul 2004 for more on all this. Sometimes things aren’t published, or are forthcoming (Hall 2009; Robertson forthcoming).
Note that there is no comma between author and date, and any locator is set off from the date by a colon and a space. The format of locators and page ranges is detailed below. Several works by an author in the same year should be distinguished by adding a lower case letter to the date, as ‘(Lewis 1973a: 23; 1973b)’. Inline citation of multiple works within the same citation should be chronologically rather than alphabetically ordered, and delimited by semi-colons. Do not use ‘&’ in multi-author citations. Avoid the use of ‘ibid.’ and ‘op. cit.’. For authors where there is a standardized system of reference, please use it: ‘Aristotle’s Physics (1984: 198a22–5)’. When a cited work has four or more authors/editors, in-text citations should list only the first two and replace the remainder by ‘et al.’.
Please use the year of preparation of an unpublished manuscript, except when a journal article or book chapter is forthcoming and has been accepted for publication:
The most common authorial error, even at the final stages of preparation, consists in failing to reconcile in-text citations with the final list of references.
Locators and page number ranges
In an inline citation like ‘(Lewis 1973: 5)’, the locator following the colon after the publication year is understood by default to refer to a page or page range; no indication like ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ is needed. When page numbers are available as locators, especially in the case of quotations, use them. When page numbers are absent or unhelpful, please use the standard abbreviations for alternative locators in the table below.
| Locator | Single | Multiple |
|---|---|---|
| Section | Lewis (1973: §8) | Lewis (1973: §§12–13) |
| Paragraph | Lewis (1973: ¶8) | Lewis (1973: ¶¶12–13) |
| Line | Lewis (1973: l. 8) | Lewis (1973: ll. 12–13) |
| Figure | Lewis (1973: fig. 8) | Lewis (1973: figs. 12–13) |
| Verse | Lewis (1973: v. 8) | Lewis (1973: vv. 12–13) |
| Volume | Lewis (1973: vol. 8) | Lewis (1973: vols. 12–13) |
| Chapter | Lewis (1973: ch. 8) | Lewis (1973: chs. 12–13) |
| Note | Lewis (1973: n. 8) | Lewis (1973: nn. 12–13) |
| Column | Lewis (1973: col. 8) | Lewis (1973: cols. 12–13) |
| Part | Lewis (1973: pt. 8) | Lewis (1973: pts. 12–13) |
An en-dash ‘–’ should be used to span a number range, not a hyphen. Page number ranges, in citations and references, should follow Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed and later) rules:
| First number | Second number | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 100 | Use all digits | 3–10; 71–72; 92–113; |
| 100 or multiple of 100 | Use all digits | 100–104; 600–613; 1100–1123 |
| 101 through 109, 201 through 209, etc. (for each multiple of 100) | Use changed part only, omitting unneeded zeroes | 107–8; 505–17; 1002–6 |
| Everything else (110 through 199, 210 through 299, etc.; for each multiple of 100) | Use two digits, unless more digits are needed to show the changed part | 321–25; 415–532; 1087–89; 1496–500; 11564–68; 13792–803; 12991–3001 |
References
A final list of cited works must be included, headed ‘References’. Items in the list must include sufficient bibliographic information to assist readers in following up and verifying citations, formatted according to the following examples. All authors/editors of a given work should be included. (Except in the special case where there are more than seven authors/editors, in which case the first five should be listed and the remainder abbreviated by et al.)
References should be sorted alphabetically by first (or sole) author surname, then given names, then by subsequent author(s) surnames. When there is more than one work with exactly the same author(s), those works should be in turn sorted chronologically. Where more than one work by the same person is listed, the author’s name must be repeated in the list rather than replaced by dashes (this is to aid searching). When an author appears both as sole author and as a first co-author, the former should precede the latter in the list. For example:
Bloggs, J (1979) …
Bloggs, J (1983) …
Bloggs, J and Jane Doe (1971) …
Bloggs, J and Joan Roe (1981) …
The first author is listed ‘Surname, Given name(s)/initial(s)’; subsequent authors are listed ‘Given name(s)/initial(s) Surname’. Do not use ‘&’ for multi-author listings; use ‘and’ instead. Use the Oxford comma.
Some surnames have ‘dropping’ particles (for instance, ‘Ludwig van Beethoven’ becomes ‘Beethoven’). Others have ‘non-dropping’ particles (for instance, ‘Peter van Inwagen’ becomes ‘van Inwagen’). Clearly no syntactic rule will decide these cases. The surname in the bibliography should be the surname less any dropping particles, but should be alphabetised less any non-dropping particles. So ‘van Inwagen, Peter’ should appear in the bibliography under ‘I’.
Author given name(s) may be listed either in full or just via initial letter(s). Where initials are used, they should not be followed by full stops, but should be followed by spaces: e.g., ‘Prior, A N’, ‘Moore, G E’, ‘Paul, L A’. This also goes for names used in the main text.
Any name suffix should appear after the whole name: ‘Belnap, Nuel D, Jr’.
Some authors change names during the course of their career; no hard and fast rule could govern how they are to be cited, but good manners should be your guide. Sometimes authors who change their given name keep the same initial for continuity of citations; just cite them by initial.
Book and articles titles should be in title case.
The example references below were selected to illustrate many cases of interest, but are not exhaustive. When in doubt, find an example below that is close to your situation and adapt it.
Articles
The general format is this:
Author, First and Second Author (year) ‘Article Title’, Journal Title volume: page range. doi:xxx
Examples:
Belnap, Nuel D, Jr (1962) ‘Tonk, Plonk and Plink’, Analysis 22: 130–34. doi:10.1093/analys/22.6.130.
Cartwright, Nancy (1979) ‘Causal Laws and Effective Strategies’, Noûs 13: 419–37. doi:10.2307/2215337.
Langton, Rae and David Lewis (1998) ‘Defining “Intrinsic”’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 333–45. doi:10.2307/2653512.
Lewis, David (1973a) ‘Causation’, Journal of Philosophy 70: 556–67. doi:10.2307/2025310.
Lewis, David (2000) ‘Causation as Influence’, Journal of Philosophy 97: 182–97. doi:10.2307/2678389.
Lewis, Peter J (2007) ‘Uncertainty and Probability for Branching Selves’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38: 1–14. doi:10.1016/j.shpsb.2006.02.001.
Russell, Bertrand (1913) ‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13: 1–26. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/13.1.1.
- Titles of articles are listed in quotes; titles of journals are italicized.
- Volume numbers of journals are given in boldface Arabic numerals. Issue numbers are not needed and should not be included.
-
- There is one exception to this rule: when a journal does not number pages continuously within a volume so that volume and page number ambiguously refers. (One prominent example: Philosophers' Imprint starts each issue in a volume at page 1.) In that rare case, issue numbers should be included; they may need to be supplied manually as the CSL style is not quite smart enough to figure out which journals engage in this practice.
- Note that, to aid readers, DOIs must be supplied for journal articles, where available. PhilPapers will be a great help to you here.
- For articles that have been published ‘online first’ and not yet assigned to an issue, a DOI is mandatory, but volume and page numbers are not.
- Omit initial ‘The’ from the titles of journals, even those that officially include it. So ‘The Philosophical Review’ appears as ‘Philosophical Review’; likewise ‘Journal of Philosophy’, ’Monist’, etc.
Books
The general format is this:
Author, First and Second Author (year) Book Title, nth edition, Editor McTranslator, ed./trans. Publisher.
Examples:
Aristotle (1984) Physics Books I and II, William Charlton, trans. Clarendon Press.
Collins, J, Ned Hall, and L A Paul, eds. (2004) Causation and Counterfactuals. MIT Press.
Descartes, René (1641/1996) Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, John Cottingham, ed., trans. Cambridge University Press.
van Fraassen, Bas C (1980) The Scientific Image. Clarendon Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1787/1933) Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edition, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. Macmillan.
Le Poidevin, Robin, Peter Simons, Andrew McGonigal, and Ross P Cameron, eds. (2009) The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics. Routledge.
Lewis, David (1973b) Counterfactuals. Blackwell.
Paul, L A and Ned Hall (2013) Causation: A User’s Guide. Oxford University Press.
- Titles of books and journals are given in italics.
- The publisher is given, but the city of publication is omitted.
- ‘Editor’ is abbreviated ‘ed.’, ‘editors’ to ‘eds.’ ‘Translator’ likewise. Both appear after the name(s) of the editor/translator. ‘Edition’ is left unabbreviated, but the number of the edition is abbreviated (‘2nd edition’, not ‘Second edition’).
- DOIs are not needed for books.
Chapter in a book
The general format is this:
Author, First and Second Author (year) ‘Chapter title’, in Editor Name, ed., Book Title: page range. Publisher.
Examples:
Armstrong, D M (1999) ‘The Open Door’, in Howard Sankey, ed., Causation and Laws of Nature: 175–85. Kluwer.
Hitchcock, Christopher (2007) ‘What Russell Got Right’, in Huw Price and Richard Corry, eds., Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited: 45–65. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, David (1986) ‘A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance’, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: 83–132. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, David (2007) ‘Divine Evil’, in Louise Antony, ed., Philosophers Without Gods: 231–42. Oxford University Press.
- Titles of chapters in books are listed in quotes; titles of books are italicised.
- Editor is generally omitted in a collection of an author’s own papers.
Other Items (Online Publications, Websites, Theses)
There tends to be more diversity in the kinds of bibliographic information available for these types of items. The general rule is to mimic as closely as possible formats for an article, book, or chapter; the aim is to aid the reader in locating the resource. URLs must be supplied if available.
Examples:
Avigad, Jeremy and Richard Zach (2020) ‘The Epsilon Calculus’, in Edward N Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/epsilon-calculus/.
Beebee, Helen and Jenny Saul (2011) Women in Philosophy in the UK. British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy UK. https://www.swipuk.org/uploads/5/6/3/5/56350169/women_in_philosophy_in_the_uk__bpa-swipuk_report_.pdf.
Glynn, Luke (2009) A Probabilistic Analysis of Causation. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford.
Hall, Ned (2009) ‘Humean Reductionism about Laws of Nature’. https://philarch ive.org/rec/HALHRA.
Hume, David (1777/2022) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Amyas Merivale and Peter Millican, eds. https://davidhume.org/texts/e/.
Robertson, Katie (forthcoming) ‘Autonomy Generalised; or, Why Doesn‘t Physics Matter More?’, Ergo.
Common mistakes
Common mistakes that occur in the list of references include the following:
- not giving the full title of a book;
- not including the book’s complete sub-title;
- not presenting the names of co-authors in the correct order;
- not listing the family names and given names of the authors, co-authors, editors, and/or co-editors in the specified style;
- rendering a publisher’s name colloquially (e.g. ‘OUP’ for ‘Oxford University Press’ or ‘MIT’ for ‘The MIT Press’, etc.);
- including the place of publication;
- missing, incorrect, or broken DOIs for journal articles;
- rendering a journal title colloquially (e.g., ‘AJP’ for ‘Australasian Journal of Philosophy’ – please note, the journal does not use ISO4 journal title abbreviations such as ‘Australas J Philos’);
- inconsistency between entries of the same type.