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Using the APSR Citation Style With Bibtex

  • Published: Feb 5, 2023
  • Updated: Jun 14, 2026
  • 2-minute read

Update, June 2026: I have updated the .bst file in the GitHub repository to improve APSA/APSR reference-list formatting. The current release omits publication months from reference-list entries and places the final period of article titles inside quotation marks when the title does not already end with punctuation. The usage instructions below remain the same. Thanks to Richard Boylan at Rice University for identifying the publication-month and title-punctuation issues.

My colleague, Sam Jens, found several inconsistencies between the APSR style in natbib and the APSR submission guidelines. First, BibTeX’s APSR style has a comma between authors and year. Second, BibTeX’s APSR style does not include a comma before “and” when there are three authors. The code \setcitestyle{aysep={}} fixes the former but not the latter. The official APSR template on Overleaf has additional inconsistencies. To address these issues, I modified the .bst file from the official APSR template on Overleaf.

View on GitHub

To use it, download the .bst file and put it in the same directory as your .tex file. In your .tex file, add the following code before \begin{document}:

\usepackage{natbib}
\setcitestyle{aysep={}} % remove the comma between authors and years

and insert the following code where you want the reference section to appear:

\bibliographystyle{chicago-apsr-ph}
\bibliography{} % your .bib file name in the curly brackets
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