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

Rubin AE. Planetary science. Fragments of the lunar cataclysm. Science. 2012 Jun 15;336(6087):1390–1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Coffin JM, Stoye JP. Virology. A new virus for old diseases? Science. 2009 Oct 23;326(5952):530–1.

A journal article with 3 authors

Luo ZX, Ji Q, Yuan CX. Convergent dental adaptations in pseudo-tribosphenic and tribosphenic mammals. Nature. 2007 Nov 1;450(7166):93–7.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Ouellette DG, Moetakef P, Cain TA, Zhang JY, Stemmer S, Emin D, et al. High-density two-dimensional small polaron gas in a delta-doped Mott insulator. Sci Rep. 2013 Nov 21;3:3284.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rassool GH. Addiction for Nurses. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010.

An edited book

Litvinenko V, editor. XVIII International Coal Preparation Congress: 28 June—01 July 2016 Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. XXXVIII, 1196 p. 677 illus., 300 illus. in color.

A chapter in an edited book

Apu RA, Gavrilova ML. Efficient Swarm Neighborhood Management Using the Layered Delaunay Triangulation. In: Gavrilova ML, editor. Generalized Voronoi Diagram: A Geometry-Based Approach to Computational Intelligence. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009. p. 109–29. (Kacprzyk J, editor. Studies in Computational Intelligence).

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; 2014 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Morgan Freeman’s Voice on Helium. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/morgan-freeman’s-voice-helium/

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. Need To Improve System for Managing Capitalized Equipment in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1968 May. Report No.: B-114868.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Sampson R. The effects of foster care on children: A comparison of 18th century through modern day foster care practices [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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

Barry E. Dancer Held in Acid Attack on Bolshoi Director. New York Times. 2013 Mar 6;A1.

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