How to format your references using the American Educational Research Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Educational Research Journal. 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

Klibanov, A. M. (2001). Improving enzymes by using them in organic solvents. Nature, 409(6817), 241–246.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rakow, N. A., & Suslick, K. S. (2000). A colorimetric sensor array for odour visualization. Nature, 406(6797), 710–713.

A journal article with 3 authors

de Forges, B. R., Koslow, J. A., & Poore, G. C. (2000). Diversity and endemism of the benthic seamount fauna in the southwest Pacific. Nature, 405(6789), 944–947.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Huang, P.-R., He, Y., Cao, C., & Lu, Z.-H. (2014). Impact of lattice distortion and electron doping on α-MoO3 electronic structure. Scientific Reports, 4, 7131.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Aasma, A., Dutta, H., & Natarajan, P. N. (2017). An Introductory Course in Summability Theory. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Toriwaki, J. (2009). Fundamentals of Three-Dimensional Digital Image Processing (H. Yoshida, Ed.; 1st ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Anellis, I. H. (2015). Peirce’s Role in the History of Logic: Lingua Universalis and Calculus Ratiocinator. In A. Koslow & A. Buchsbaum (Eds.), The Road to Universal Logic: Festschrift for the 50th Birthday of Jean-Yves Béziau Volume II (pp. 135–169). 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 American Educational Research Journal.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2016, July 4). Scientists Recreate Pac-Man With Microorganisms. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/scientists-recreate-pacman-with-microorganisms/

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. (1992). Technology Transfer: Barriers Limit Royalty Sharing’s Effectiveness (RCED-93-6). 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

Shockley, C. (2010). Mental health parity law: A policy analysis [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

Wagner, J. (2017, October 25). ‘Madman’ On Mound, Coolheaded Off the Field. New York Times, B12.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Klibanov, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Klibanov, 2001; Rakow & Suslick, 2000).

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

Two authors: (Rakow & Suslick, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Huang et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Educational Research Journal
Abbreviation	Am. Educ. Res. J.
ISSN (print)	0002-8312
ISSN (online)	1935-1011
Scope	Education