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

Alexander, R. M. (2007). Obituary: Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (1915-2007). Nature, 446(7137), 744.

A journal article with 2 authors

Martin, S. G., & St Johnston, D. (2003). A role for Drosophila LKB1 in anterior-posterior axis formation and epithelial polarity. Nature, 421(6921), 379–384.

A journal article with 3 authors

Michel, P., Benz, W., & Richardson, D. C. (2003). Disruption of fragmented parent bodies as the origin of asteroid families. Nature, 421(6923), 608–611.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Long, J., Huang, X., Liao, Y., Hu, X., Hu, J., Lui, S., Zhang, R., Li, Y., & Gong, Q. (2014). Prediction of post-earthquake depressive and anxiety symptoms: a longitudinal resting-state fMRI study. Scientific Reports, 4, 6423.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Baines, P., Ferraro, J., & Rogers, P. (2010). The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing 1660 - 1789. Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Blokhuis, H., Miele, M., Veissier, I., & Jones, B. (Eds.). (2013). Improving farm animal welfare: Science and society working together: the Welfare Quality approach. Wageningen Academic Publishers.

A chapter in an edited book

Lorenzini, C., Faita, C., Barsotti, M., Carrozzino, M., Tecchia, F., & Bergamasco, M. (2015). ADITHO – A Serious Game for Training and Evaluating Medical Ethics Skills. In K. Chorianopoulos, M. Divitini, J. Baalsrud Hauge, L. Jaccheri, & R. Malaka (Eds.), Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2015: 14th International Conference, ICEC 2015, Trondheim, Norway, September 29 - Ocotober 2, 2015, Proceedings (pp. 59–71). 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

Carpineti, A. (2017, May 25). NASA’s Mission To Metal Asteroid Psyche Will Now Arrive Four Years Earlier. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/nasas-mission-to-metal-asteroid-psyche-will-now-arrive-four-years-earlier/

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. (1997). Transportation Issue Area Plan--Fiscal Years 1998-2000 (IAP-97-15). 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

Pei, X. (2008). Acid modification of psyllium [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Blinder, A., Baker, A. L., & David Goodman, J. (2014, December 25). Tracing Gun Used to Kill 2 Officers, Officials Wind Up in a Familiar Spot. New York Times, A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Alexander, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Alexander, 2007; Martin & St Johnston, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Martin & St Johnston, 2003)
Three authors: (Michel et al., 2003)
6 or more authors: (Long 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

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