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:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
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

Keller, U. (2003). Recent developments in compact ultrafast lasers. Nature, 424(6950), 831–838.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lee, L. P., & Szema, R. (2005). Inspirations from biological optics for advanced photonic systems. Science (New York, N.Y.), 310(5751), 1148–1150.

A journal article with 3 authors

Copley, A., Avouac, J.-P., & Wernicke, B. P. (2011). Evidence for mechanical coupling and strong Indian lower crust beneath southern Tibet. Nature, 472(7341), 79–81.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Silva, D. B., Turatti, I. C. C., Gouveia, D. R., Ernst, M., Teixeira, S. P., & Lopes, N. P. (2014). Mass spectrometry of flavonoid vicenin-2, based sunlight barriers in Lychnophora species. Scientific Reports, 4, 4309.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cruz, M. G., Peters, G. W., & Shevchenko, P. V. (2015). Fundamental Aspects of Operational Risk and Insurance Analytics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Xiang, Y. (2015). Blind Source Separation: Dependent Component Analysis (D. Peng & Z. Yang, Eds.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Gardbaum, S. (2016). Decoupling Judicial Review from Judicial Supremacy. In T. Bustamante & B. Gonçalves Fernandes (Eds.), Democratizing Constitutional Law: Perspectives on Legal Theory and the Legitimacy of Constitutionalism (pp. 93–118). 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 African Identities.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016, May 4). A Rare Transit Of Mercury Will Take Place This Monday - Here’s How To Watch It Live. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/rare-transit-mercury-will-happen-monday/

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. (2004). Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee: IRAC Representatives Effectively Coordinate Federal Spectrum but Lack Seniority to Advise on Contentious Policy Issues (GAO-04-1028). 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

Mendez, H. (2009). Examination of friendship and burnout among child welfare workers [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

Marx, L. (2017, January 26). A Nascar Driver Finds His ‘Shooting Star.’ New York Times, ST9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Keller, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Keller, 2003; Lee & Szema, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Lee & Szema, 2005)
Three authors: (Copley et al., 2011)
6 or more authors: (Silva et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	African Identities
ISSN (print)	1472-5843
ISSN (online)	1472-5851
Scope	Anthropology Cultural Studies