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

Perutz, R.N. 2008. “Chemistry. A catalytic foothold for fluorocarbon reactions.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 321(5893):1168–1169.

A journal article with 2 authors

Peterca, M., and V. Percec. 2010. “Materials science. Recasting metal alloy phases with block copolymers.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 330(6002):333–334.

A journal article with 3 authors

Okada, Y., H. Higuchi, and N. Hirokawa. 2003. “Processivity of the single-headed kinesin KIF1A through biased binding to tubulin.” Nature 424(6948):574–577.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Huang, Y., J. Fang, M.T. Bedford, Y. Zhang, and R.-M. Xu. 2006. “Recognition of histone H3 lysine-4 methylation by the double tudor domain of JMJD2A.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 312(5774):748–751.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Abdul-Rahman, Y. 2014. The Art of RF (Riba-Free) Islamic Banking and Finance. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Ascher, W. 2016. Development Strategies and Inter-Group Violence: Insights on Conflict-Sensitive Development N. Mirovitskaya, ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan US.

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang, X., X. Yang, and Q. Li. 2015. “The Data Envelopment Analysis of Eco-efficiency in Western China from 2000 to 2010.” In M. Li, Q. Zhang, R. Zhang, and X. Shi, eds. Proceedings of 2014 1st International Conference on Industrial Economics and Industrial Security. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 25–32.

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

Taub, B. 2016. “Horses Ask People For Help When They’re Stuck.” IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/horses-ask-people-help-when-theyre-stuck/ [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. 2015. “Aviation Security: TSA Has Taken Steps to Improve Oversight of Key Programs, but Additional Actions Are Needed.” No. GAO-15-559T, 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

Moose, A.M. 2013. The Relationship of Distributed Expertise and Shared Leadership in New Product Development Teams: A Comparative Case Study. Doctoral dissertation. Washington, DC: George Washington 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

Oestreich, J.R. 2017. “A Conductor Celebrates Monteverdi’s 450th.” New York Times:C2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Perutz 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Perutz 2008; Peterca and Percec 2010).

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

Two authors: (Peterca and Percec 2010)
Three authors: (Okada, Higuchi and Hirokawa 2003)
4 or more authors: (Huang et al. 2006)

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