Journal Templates

The following templates work with biblatex citation commands. The templates automate both in-text and bibliography citation styles.

BJPS Preprint Template and what it looks like

Philosophy of Science/PSA:

  1. PoS Copy Editing Template and output

  2. PoS Preprint Template and output

Biblatex has some key advantages over natbib citation commands. (Michael Cuffaro has template versions for natbib).

JPhil citation template and what it looks like (i.e. footnote citations in author-title style, for the Journal of Philosophy. Note that this reproduces the “op. cit.” functionality of biblatex’s verbosetrad2 style but in biblatex-chicago)

Biblatex is also compatible with both backend=bibtex and natbib commands, using \usepackage[natbib=true]{biblatex}.


Bibliography management best practices

Store your bibliography entries in Title Case, not Sentence case. You can use \DeclareFieldFormat{titlecase}{\MakeSentenceCase*{#1}} in the preamble to send Title Case to sentence case in the references, but there seems to be no command for the inverse. [Note that this command unfortunately sends proper nouns to sentence case as well, which will need to be protected by curly braces, e.g. “{O}xford handbook”. But fixing these on a case-by-case basis is far easier than systematically sending sentence case to Title Case!]

If you’ve realized this too late (like I did), you can systemically find-replace all starting-word letters in your master bib file to get them into Title Case. (This is genuinely tedious).

For volume and edition fields, store just the number, with no words or phrases. The bibliography style adds these automatically. E.g. Volume = {2}, NOT Volume = {second}, and Edition = {3}, NOT Edition = {3rd}


Other advice

To format any bibliography style, I recommend using the biblatex-ext package/manual. Another good guide is Stanley’s “An Easier Read”. The Biblatex manual itself is pretty tough-going. For a brief introduction to common modifications in biblatex, see Sehra’s guide.

It is crucial to start off with the built-in citation style that most closely matches the output you're going for.