How to format your references using the African Identities citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for African Identities. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Brady, O. (2014). Scale up the supply of experimental Ebola drugs. Nature, 512(7514), 233.
A journal article with 2 authors
Kalnay, E., & Cai, M. (2003). Impact of urbanization and land-use change on climate. Nature, 423(6939), 528–531.
A journal article with 3 authors
Cysouw, M., Dediu, D., & Moran, S. (2012). Comment on “Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 335(6069), 657; author reply 657.
A journal article with 21 or more authors
Enache, D. I., Edwards, J. K., Landon, P., Solsona-Espriu, B., Carley, A. F., Herzing, A. A., Watanabe, M., Kiely, C. J., Knight, D. W., & Hutchings, G. J. (2006). Solvent-free oxidation of primary alcohols to aldehydes using Au-Pd/TiO2 catalysts. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5759), 362–365.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Sears, R. W., & Chard, K. M. (2016). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Morava, E., Baumgartner, M., Patterson, M., Rahman, S., Zschocke, J., & Peters, V. (Eds.). (2016). JIMD Reports, Volume 29 (1st ed. 2016, Vol. 29). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Chan, K., & Poernomo, I. (2008). Consistent Metric Usage: From Design to Deployment. In I. Eusgeld, F. C. Freiling, & R. Reussner (Eds.), Dependability Metrics: Advanced Lectures (pp. 19–36). 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 African Identities.

Blog post
Andrews, R. (2016, November 22). The Entire San Andreas Fault Could Rupture During The “Big One.” IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/entire-san-andreas-fault-rupture-during-big-one/

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. (1988). Airline Competition: Fare and Service Changes at St. Louis Since the TWA-Ozark Merger (RCED-88-217BR). 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
Patil, A. V. (2017). Programming QR code scanner, communicating Android devices, and unit testing in fortified cards [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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
Gordon, M. R. (2017, June 13). Trump Gives Mattis Authority to Send More Troops to Afghanistan. New York Times, A13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brady, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Brady, 2014; Kalnay & Cai, 2003).

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

  • Two authors: (Kalnay & Cai, 2003)
  • Three or more authors: (Enache et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleAfrican Identities
ISSN (print)1472-5843
ISSN (online)1472-5851
ScopeAnthropology
Cultural Studies

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