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Referencing and Citation Style

Referencing Style

Peer Academics uses APA 7th edition for every article type and every discipline it publishes, including legal scholarship. The journal made this choice so that a multidisciplinary reader meets one citation system across the whole journal and so that copyediting does not become a negotiation about style. Manuscripts submitted in another style are returned for reformatting before review.

Two rules govern everything below. Every in-text citation must have a matching entry in the reference list, and every entry in the reference list must be cited at least once in the text. Check this yourself before you submit; reference software does not check it for you.

The people and works used as examples on this page are invented, apart from the journal's own website in the last worked example. They illustrate the form of a citation and nothing more: no publication, dataset, or web page attributed to them exists.

In-text citation

  • Cite by author and year: parenthetically, (Ionescu, 2021), or narratively, Ionescu (2021) argued that…
  • Two authors: name both every time, joined by "and" in narrative form and "&" in parentheses — (Ionescu & Weber, 2021).
  • Three or more authors: give the first author followed by "et al." from the first citation onward — (Ionescu et al., 2021).
  • Organizations: spell the name out at first citation with the abbreviation in square brackets, then use the abbreviation — (Example Research Institute [ERI], 2022), then (ERI, 2022).
  • Give a page or paragraph number for every direct quotation and for any specific claim a reader would otherwise have to hunt for — (Ionescu, 2021, p. 47), (Weber, 2019, paras. 12–14).
  • Several works in one parenthesis: alphabetical order, separated by semicolons — (Ionescu, 2021; Weber, 2019).
  • Same author and year: distinguish with letters — (Ionescu, 2021a, 2021b) — and use the same letters in the reference list.
  • Cite what you have read. If you must rely on a source you could not obtain, say so: (Fischer, 1978, as cited in Ionescu, 2021), and list only Ionescu (2021) in the reference list.
  • Because review is double-anonymous, cite your own earlier work in the third person like any other source. Do not blind or delete the self-citation; see the Author Guidelines.

Reference list rules

  • One list, alphabetical by the first author's surname, with a hanging indent. Do not group by source type.
  • List up to 20 authors. With 21 or more, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author.
  • Titles of articles, chapters, books, and datasets take sentence case (capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns). Journal names take title case and are italicized, as are book titles and volume numbers.
  • Give the DOI of any source that has one, as a full link in the form https://doi.org/…. If there is no DOI, give a stable URL. Do not add a retrieval date unless the content is designed to change, such as a wiki or a live statistical table.
  • Cite sources in the language of publication. Give the original title, then an English translation in square brackets, and note the language if it is not evident: Dreptul la viață privată [The right to private life].
  • Reference management software (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, BibTeX with an APA style) is fine, but its output must be corrected by hand. Broken capitalization, missing DOIs, and duplicated entries are the author's responsibility, not the copyeditor's.

Worked examples

Copy the punctuation and the italics of these patterns exactly, and nothing else. Every reference below is fabricated for illustration — the authors, titles, journals, publishers, dates, and identifiers are invented, the deposits shown in Zenodo and SocArXiv do not exist, and the DOIs and URLs do not resolve. The final example, which cites the journal's own website, is the only real one.

  • Journal article. Ionescu, A. M., & Weber, K. (2021). Regional labor mobility and skill recognition in the European Union. Journal of Example Studies, 31(4), 415–431. https://doi.org/10.0000/example.2021.0415
  • Book. Weber, K. (2019). Administrative discretion and the rule of law (2nd ed.). Example University Press.
  • Chapter in an edited book. Ionescu, A. M. (2022). Evidence and inference in comparative constitutional research. In L. Marin & P. Dumitru (Eds.), Methods in comparative public law (pp. 112–138). Example Academic Press.
  • Dataset. Marin, L. (2023). Survey of doctoral supervision practices in Romanian universities, 2022 (Version 1.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.0000000
  • Preprint. Dumitru, P., & Weber, K. (2024). Measuring procedural fairness in administrative appeals [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/000000
  • Web page. Example Research Institute. (2022, June 14). Recognition of professional qualifications. https://www.example.org/recognition-of-qualifications
  • Web page with no date. Asociația Societatea Studenților din Uniunea Europeană. (n.d.). Peer Academics. Retrieved March 3, 2026, from https://peeracademics.com

Legislation and case law

APA 7th edition does not set out rules for the legal materials of every jurisdiction; it defers to the citation conventions used by lawyers. Peer Academics therefore asks you to cite legal materials in the established form of the jurisdiction they come from, in full, in the reference list, and to be consistent within the manuscript. A legal reference must contain enough to retrieve the instrument: its official title or the parties' names, its number, the official publication or reporter, and the date. Use the short form in the text — (GDPR, 2016), (Case C-000/00, 2020) — and give the full form in the reference list. In the patterns below, numbers shown as zeros are placeholders for the real ones; the General Data Protection Regulation entry is a complete and genuine citation, given so that you can see one.

  • EU legislation. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, pp. 1–88. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj
  • Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Case C-000/00, Applicant v. Respondent, ECLI:EU:C:2020:000 (CJEU, 12 May 2020).
  • Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. Applicant v. Romania, App. No. 00000/00, ECLI:CE:ECHR:2019:0114JUD0000000 (ECtHR, 14 January 2019).
  • Romanian legislation. Legea nr. 000/2020 privind [subject] [Law no. 000/2020 on subject], Monitorul Oficial al României, Partea I, nr. 000 of 3 March 2020.
  • Romanian case law. Înalta Curte de Casație și Justiție, Secția I civilă, decizia nr. 000 of 3 March 2021.
  • Other national legislation. Give the official short title, the statute or act number, the official gazette or statute book, and the date, in the form used in that country; add an English translation of the title in square brackets where the original is not in English.
  • United States materials, where you cite them, follow the form used by APA and The Bluebook: Party v. Party, 000 U.S. 000 (2000); 00 U.S.C. § 000 (2018).

Legal materials that are also scholarly works — treatises, commentaries, casebooks — are cited as books, not as legal materials. If you cite a large number of instruments, you may add a separate list headed "Legislation and cases" after the reference list, in chronological order within jurisdiction; tell the editor in your cover letter if you do.

If your references are not in APA form

An editor screening your submission checks the reference list. A list in another style, a list with numbered citations in the text, or a list whose entries cannot be traced is returned to you for correction before review. This costs you the time it takes to fix it, so fix it first.