How to format your references using the Action Learning: Research and Practice citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Action Learning: Research and Practice. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Dallek, Robert. 2009. “All the President’s Scholarly Men.” Nature 458 (7238): 572–573.

A journal article with 2 authors

Roelofs, J., and P. J. Van Haastert. 2001. “Genes Lost during Evolution.” Nature 411 (6841): 1013–1014.

A journal article with 3 authors

Säterberg, Torbjörn, Stefan Sellman, and Bo Ebenman. 2013. “High Frequency of Functional Extinctions in Ecological Networks.” Nature 499 (7459): 468–470.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Findlay, Helen S., Sebastian J. Hennige, Laura C. Wicks, Juan Moreno Navas, E. Malcolm S. Woodward, and J. Murray Roberts. 2014. “Fine-Scale Nutrient and Carbonate System Dynamics around Cold-Water Coral Reefs in the Northeast Atlantic.” Scientific Reports 4 (January 2014): 3671.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Morgan, Adam. 2009. Eating the Big Fish. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Hähnle, Reiner, Jens Knoop, Tiziana Margaria, Dietmar Schreiner, and Bernhard Steffen, eds. 2012. Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation: International Workshops, SARS 2011 and MLSC 2011, Held Under the Auspices of ISoLA 2011 in Vienna, Austria, October 17-18, 2011. Revised Selected Papers. Vol. 336. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Agarwal, Ashok, Sajal Gupta, and Rakesh Sharma. 2016. “Semen Analysis Using Hamilton-Thorne Computer Assisted Semen Analyzer (CASA).” In Andrological Evaluation of Male Infertility: A Laboratory Guide, edited by Ashok Agarwal, Sajal Gupta, and Rakesh Sharma, 47–58. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Action Learning: Research and Practice.

Blog post

Fang, Janet. 2014. “Mysterious 55-Million-Year-Old Rhino-Horse Relative Found in India.” IFLScience, IFLScience, November 21. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mysterious-55-million-year-old-rhino-horse-relative-found-india/.

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. 1976. Research and Development and the Economy. 094660. 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

Eastwood, Jennifer L. 2010. “The Effects of an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Human Biology Program on Socioscientific Reasoning, Content Learning, and Understanding of Inquiry.” Doctoral dissertation, Indiana 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

Koblin, John. 2017. “‘Game of Thrones’ Spinoffs From HBO.” New York Times, May 4, 2017.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Dallek 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Dallek 2009; Roelofs and Van Haastert 2001).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Roelofs and Van Haastert 2001)
Three authors: (Säterberg, Sellman, and Ebenman 2013)
4 or more authors: (Findlay et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Action Learning: Research and Practice
Abbreviation	Action Learn.
ISSN (print)	1476-7333
ISSN (online)	1476-7341
Scope	General Business, Management and Accounting Education