How to format your references using the Academic Questions citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Academic Questions. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

McCabe, H. 2000. Post-cold war needs “new forms of scientific linkage.” Nature 404: 8.

A journal article with 2 authors

Etiope, Giuseppe, and Paolo Ciccioli. 2009. Earth’s degassing: a missing ethane and propane source. Science (New York, N.Y.) 323: 478.

A journal article with 3 authors

Pool, Jaime A., Emil Lobkovsky, and Paul J. Chirik. 2004. Hydrogenation and cleavage of dinitrogen to ammonia with a zirconium complex. Nature 427: 527–530.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Canals, Miquel, Pere Puig, Xavier Durrieu de Madron, Serge Heussner, Albert Palanques, and Joan Fabres. 2006. Flushing submarine canyons. Nature 444: 354–357.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Plumb, John A., and Larry A. Hanson. 2010. Health Maintenance and Principal Microbial Diseases of Cultured Fishes. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Harris, J. Robin, ed. 2012. Protein Aggregation and Fibrillogenesis in Cerebral and Systemic Amyloid Disease. Vol. 65. Subcellular Biochemistry. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Bohacek, Johannes, and Isabelle M. Mansuy. 2012. Epigenetic Inheritance in Mammals. In Epigenetics, Brain and Behavior, ed. Paolo Sassone Corsi and Yves Christen, 55–62. Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Academic Questions.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2014. What Is The Smallest Thing In The Universe? IFLScience. IFLScience. August 12.

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. 1991. Traffic Management: Federal Policies to Encourage Low-Cost Approaches Need to Be Strengthened. PEMD-91-26BR. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Pezzolesi, Marcus G. 2008. Novel Mechanisms of PTEN Dysfunction in PTEN Hamartoma Tumor Syndromes. Doctoral dissertation, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Vecsey, George. 2010. England vs. United States: The Beauty of Anticipation. New York Times, June 10.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Academic Questions
Abbreviation	Acad. Quest.
ISSN (print)	0895-4852
ISSN (online)	1936-4709
Scope	Education