Style Manual for Political Science
For years, APSA has published its Style Manual for Political Science. The first iterations of the manual were predicated on the writing style used in the association’s first journal, the American Political Science Review. Those iterations outlined processes and procedures for preparing and submitting manuscripts to APSR under several different editors including: G. Bingham Powell Jr. (1992–96), Ada Finifter (1996–2001), and Lee Sigelman (2002–2006).
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.
The manual remains the standard style guide in the discipline upon which students, junior faculty members, and well-established scholars authoring manuscripts, as well as editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders, can rely. 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.
APSA style, in most instances, follows guidelines set forth in the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th 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.