How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Some trends in reference format
How to cite the references
Preparing the text

Not all journals abbreviate journal titles in references. For example, American Psychological Association (APA) style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 2020, p. 294) calls for stating periodical titles in full. More generally, journals may increasingly be including full journal titles in references. Earlier, when journals appeared only in print, publishers favored abbreviating journal titles because it saved valuable space, thus saving paper costs or allowing more papers to be published. Today, with many journals appearing mainly or solely online, the space saved may be less of a consideration than are convenience to authors and clarity to readers. Writing out journal titles in full may serve especially well in journals that publish interdisciplinary papers, and thus have readers who might not understand the abbreviations of some words in the titles of cited journals.

If a journal article has been published online, either exclusively or as well as in print, the publisher quite likely has assigned it a digital object identifier (DOI), which specifies a persistent link to its location on the internet. If an article has a DOI, it commonly appears on the first page. Some reference formats include providing the DOI, if one exists, at the end of the reference. Additional information about DOIs is available at www.doi.org.