How to format your references using the American Journal of Agricultural Economics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE). 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

Holden, C. 2000. “DIVERSITY: Parity as a Goal Sparks Bitter Battle.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 289(5478):380.

A journal article with 2 authors

Willis, J.K., and J.A. Church. 2012. “Climate change. Regional sea-level projection.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 336(6081):550–551.

A journal article with 3 authors

Nederbragt, A.J., A.E. van Loon, and W.J.A.G. Dictus. 2002. “Evolutionary biology: hedgehog crosses the snail’s midline.” Nature 417(6891):811–812.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Shimizu, Y., Y. Ogawa, K. Sugiura, J.-I. Takeda, K. Sakai-Sawada, T. Yanagi, A. Kon, D. Sawamura, H. Shimizu, and M. Akiyama. 2014. “A palindromic motif in the -2084 to -2078 upstream region is essential for ABCA12 promoter function in cultured human keratinocytes.” Scientific reports 4:6737.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Delgado, R.L.-C., and M. Araki. 2006. Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Eiter, T., H. Strass, M. Truszczyński, and S. Woltran eds. 2015. Advances in Knowledge Representation, Logic Programming, and Abstract Argumentation: Essays Dedicated to Gerhard Brewka on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Petitjean, M. 2013. “Spheres Unions and Intersections and Some of their Applications in Molecular Modeling.” In A. Mucherino, C. Lavor, L. Liberti, and N. Maculan, eds. Distance Geometry: Theory, Methods, and Applications. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 61–83.

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 Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014. “Religious Children Struggle To Separate Fact From Fiction.” IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/religious-children-struggle-separate-fact-fiction/ [Accessed October 30, 2018].

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. 2003. “Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Highway Trust Fund Excise Taxes.” No. GAO-03-360R, 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

Martinez, J. 2013. Effective nonprofit collaborative networks. Doctoral dissertation. Malibu, CA: Pepperdine 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

Kelly, C. 2014. “The Trade-Offs of Relocating North to Canada.” New York Times:F6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Holden 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Holden 2000; Willis and Church 2012).

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

Two authors: (Willis and Church 2012)
Three authors: (Nederbragt, van Loon and Dictus 2002)
4 or more authors: (Shimizu et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Agricultural Economics
Abbreviation	Am. J. Agric. Econ.
ISSN (print)	0002-9092
ISSN (online)	1467-8276
Scope	Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) Economics and Econometrics