How to format your references using the American Family Physician citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Family Physician. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Caplan A. Genome-sequencing anniversary. What will drive genomics over the next 10 years? Science. 2011 Feb 11;331(6018):691.

A journal article with 2 authors

Palmer TN, Räisänen J. Quantifying the risk of extreme seasonal precipitation events in a changing climate. Nature. 2002 Jan 31;415(6871):512–4.

A journal article with 3 authors

Oliet SH, Piet R, Poulain DA. Control of glutamate clearance and synaptic efficacy by glial coverage of neurons. Science. 2001 May 4;292(5518):923–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Vicinanza C, Aquila I, Cianflone E, Scalise M, Marino F, Mancuso T, et al. Kitcre knock-in mice fail to fate-map cardiac stem cells. Nature. 2018 Mar 21;555(7697):E1–5.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Budisa N. Engineering the Genetic Code. Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; 2005.

An edited book

Tessaris S, Franconi E, Eiter T, Gutierrez C, Handschuh S, Rousset MC, et al., editors. Reasoning Web. Semantic Technologies for Information Systems: 5th International Summer School 2009, Brixen-Bressanone, Italy, August 30 - September 4, 2009, Tutorial Lectures. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009. VII, 357 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; vol. 5689).

A chapter in an edited book

Gauyacq JP, Borisov AG. Dynamics of Resonant Electron Transfer in the Interaction Between an Atom and a Metallic Surface. In: Micha DA, Burghardt I, editors. Quantum Dynamics of Complex Molecular Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007. p. 87–109. (Zinth W, Castleman AW, Toennies JP, editors. Springer Series in Chemical Physics).

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 Family Physician.

Blog post

Andrew E. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Thousands Of Genomes Reveal Human Genetic Differences Around The World. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/thousands-genomes-reveal-human-genetic-differences-around-world/

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. Technology: America’s Schools Not Designed or Equipped for 21st Century. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1995 Apr. Report No.: T-HEHS-95-127.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Ramakrishnan L. Multi-level adaptation for performability in dynamic web service workflows [Doctoral dissertation]. [Bloomington, IN]: Indiana University; 2009.

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

(nyt) SK. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Recovering The Kursk. New York Times. 2001 Oct 18;A6.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (1).
This sentence cites two references (1,2).
This sentence cites four references (1–4).

About the journal

Full journal title	American Family Physician
ISSN (print)	0002-838X
ISSN (online)	1532-0650
Scope