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:

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
Fuyuno, I. (2006). Stuck in the middle. Nature, 442(7100), 237.
A journal article with 2 authors
Eames, M., & Kortemme, T. (2012). Cost-benefit tradeoffs in engineered lac operons. Science (New York, N.Y.), 336(6083), 911–915.
A journal article with 3 authors
Kim, J.-E., Chen, J., & Lou, Z. (2008). DBC1 is a negative regulator of SIRT1. Nature, 451(7178), 583–586.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Jin, H., Sperka, T., Herrlich, P., & Morrison, H. (2006). Tumorigenic transformation by CPI-17 through inhibition of a merlin phosphatase. Nature, 442(7102), 576–579.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Halpert, B. (2011). Auditing Cloud Computing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Shanov, S. (2015). Dynamic Tectonics and Karst (K. Kostov, Ed.). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Castrén, M. K. (2014). Compression-Only CPR Versus CPR with Ventilations. In A. Gullo & G. Ristagno (Eds.), Resuscitation: Translational Research, Clinical Evidence, Education, Guidelines (pp. 41–45). 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 American Educational Research Journal.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2015, October 22). New Research Shows How To Trap Cancer By Turning Your Body Against The Tumour. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-research-shows-how-trap-cancer-turning-your-body-against-tumour-0/

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. (1983). Issues Concerning the National Materials Policy, Research and Development Act of 1980, Public Law 96-479 (No. 121374). 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
Gao, H. (2006). Extracting Key Features for Analysis and Recognition in Computer Vision [Doctoral dissertation]. 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
Koblin, J., & Shea, C. D. (2017, April 13). Outing of ‘Survivor’ Contestant That Set Off an Uproar Was Shot Months Ago. New York Times, B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fuyuno, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Eames & Kortemme, 2012; Fuyuno, 2006).

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

  • Two authors: (Eames & Kortemme, 2012)
  • Three authors: (Kim et al., 2008)
  • 6 or more authors: (Jin et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal titleAmerican Educational Research Journal
AbbreviationAm. Educ. Res. J.
ISSN (print)0002-8312
ISSN (online)1935-1011
ScopeEducation

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