STYLE GUIDELINES FOR PAPERS WRITTEN FOR COURSES
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

You should use American Sociological Association (ASA) style for writing papers for courses taught in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Since ASA style is almost identical to American Anthropological Association style, mastering one is essentially equivalent to mastering the other. If you have any more specific questions about how to apply these guidelines in your papers and presentations for department courses, contact your instructor directly.

1. The title page should include the full title of the paper, the author(s)’s name(s) (listed vertically if more than one) and the course name, the course number, and the instructor’s name.

2. Print an abstract (150 to 200 words) on a separate page headed by the title.

3. Begin the text of your manuscript on a new page headed by the title.

a. Headings and subheadings in the text indicate the organization of the content. Generally, three heading levels are sufficient for a full-length article. See recent ASR issues for examples of heading formats.

b. Citations in the text give the last name of the author(s) and year of publication. Include page numbers whenever you quote directly from a work or refer to specific passages. Cite only those works needed to provide evidence for your assertions and to guide readers to important sources on your topic. In the following examples of text citations, ellipses (. . .) indicate manuscript text:

If an author’s name is in the text, follow it with the year in parentheses— . . . Duncan (1959); if an author’s name is not in the text, enclose the last name and year in parentheses— . . . (Gouldner 1963).
Pages cited follow the year of publication after a colon— . . . (Ramirez and Weiss 1979:239–40).
Give both last names for joint authors— . . . (Martin and Bailey 1988).
For works with three authors, list all three last names in the first citation in the text— . . . (Carr, Smith, and Jones 1962). For all subsequent citations use “et al.”— . . . (Carr et al. 1962). For works with four or more authors, use “et al.” throughout.
For institutional authorship, supply minimal identification from the complete citation— . . . (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1963:117).
List a series of citations in alphabetical order or date order separated by semicolons— . . . (Burgess 1968; Marwell et al. 1971).
Use “forthcoming” to cite sources scheduled for publication. For dissertations and unpublished papers, cite the date. If no date, use “n.d.” in place of the date— . . . Smith (forthcoming) and Oropesa (n.d.).
For machine-readable data files, cite authorship and date— . . . (Institute for Survey Research 1976).

c. Number notes in the text consecutively throughout your article using superscript Arabic numerals. If you refer to a note again later in the text, use a parenthetical note— . . . (see note 3).

4. Notes (footnotes or endnotes) should be typed or printed, double-spaced, either as footnotes at the bottom of the text pages or in a separate “ENDNOTES” section. Begin each note with the superscript numeral to which it is keyed in the text (e.g., “1 After 1981, there were . . .”). Notes can (a) explain or amplify text, (b) cite materials of limited availability, or (c) append information presented in a table or figure. Long notes can distract the reader. As alternatives, consider (a) stating in the text that information is available from the author, (b) depositing the information in a national retrieval center and inserting a short footnote or a citation in the text, or (c) adding an appendix.

5. References are presented in a separate section headed “REFERENCES.” All references cited in the text must be listed in the reference section, and vice versa. Publication information for each must be complete and correct. List the references in alphabetical order by authors’ last names; include first names and middle initials for all authors when available. List two or more entries by the same author(s) in order of the year of publication. If the cited material is not yet published but has been accepted for publication, use “Forthcoming” in place of the date and give the journal name or publishing house. For dissertations and unpublished papers, cite the date and place the paper was presented and/or where it is available. If no date is available, use “N.d.” in place of the date. If two or more cited works are by the same author(s) within the same year, list them in alphabetical order by title and distinguish them by adding the letters a, b, c, etc., to the year (or to “Forthcoming”). For works with more than one author, only the name of the first author is inverted (e.g., “Jones, Arthur B., Colin D. Smith, and James Petersen”). List all authors; using “et al.” in the reference list is not acceptable.

A few examples follow. Refer to the ASA Style Guide (2d ed., 1997) for additional examples:

Books:

Bernard, Claude. [1865] 1957. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Translated by H. C. Greene. New York: Dover.
Mason, Karen O. 1974. Women’s Labor Force Participation and Fertility. Research Triangle Park, NC: National Institutes of Health.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1960. Characteristics of Population. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Periodicals:

Goodman, Leo A. 1947a. “The Analysis of Systems of Qualitative Variables When Some of the Variables Are Unobservable. Part I—A Modified Latent Structure Approach.” American Journal of Sociology 79:1179–1259.
———. 1947b. “Exploratory Latent Structure Analysis Using Both Identifiable and Unidentifiable Models.” Biometrika 61:215–31.
Szelényi, Szonja and Jacqueline Olvera. Forthcoming. "The Declining Significance of Class: Does Gender Complicate the Story?" Theory and Society.

Collections:

Clausen, John A. 1972. “The Life Course of Individuals.” Pp. 457–514 in Aging and Society, vol. 3, A Sociology of Age Stratification, edited by M. W. Riley, M. Johnson, and A. Foner. New York: Russell Sage.

Sampson, Robert J. 1992. “Family Management and Child Development: Insights from Social Disorganization Theory.” Pp. 63–93 in Advances in Criminology Theory, vol. 3, Facts,Frameworks, and Forecasts, edited by J. McCord. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Dissertations:

Charles, Maria. 1990. “Occupational Sex Segregation: A Log-Linear Analysis of Patterns in 25 Industrial Countries.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Newspaper and non-scholarly magazine articles:
Guiles, Melinda and Krystal Miller. 1990. "Mazda and Mitsubishi-Chrysler Venture Cut Output, Following Big Three’s Lead." Wall Street Journal, January 12, pp. A2, A12.
Government documents:
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1960. Characteristics of the Population. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Machine-readable data files:

Davis, James Allan, Tom W. Smith, and Peter V. Marsden. 2002. General Social Surveys, 1972-2002: [CUMULATIVE FILE][Computer File]. 2nd ICPSR version. Chicago, IL: National Opinion Research Center [producer]. Storrs, CT: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut/Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributors].

A web page:
American Sociological Association. 1997. "Call for Help: Social Science Knowledge on Race Racism, and Race Relations." Washington, DC: American Sociological Association. Retrieved on October 15, 1997 from http://www.asanet.org /racecall.htm).
A note on electronic sources:

If you access any of the above types of materials from an Internet website, at the end of the citation you should indicate when you retrieved the materials and where you found them on the web. Here’s an example from an article from today’s New York Times:

Greenberg, Joel. 2002. “Israeli Pullback Ends 10-day Siege of Arafat’s Base.” The New York Times, September 30. Electronic edition. Retrieved on September 30, 2002 from http://www.nytimes.com/ 2002/09/30/international/middleeast/30MIDE.html.

Please note that it is NOT necessary to add the web address for materials retrieved from databases such as Sociological Collection or Infotrack that give you all the original bibliographic information for the articles you retrieve from them.