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

Gould, J. 2014. “Gene therapy: Genie in a vector.” Nature 515(7528):S160-1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Heilbron, J.L., and W.F. Bynum. 2001. “1901 and all that.” Nature 409(6816):13–16.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aitken, C.M., D.M. Jones, and S.R. Larter. 2004. “Anaerobic hydrocarbon biodegradation in deep subsurface oil reservoirs.” Nature 431(7006):291–294.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Cirak, F., J.E. Cisternas, A.M. Cuitiño, G. Ertl, P. Holmes, I.G. Kevrekidis, M. Ortiz, H.H. Rotermund, M. Schunack, and J. Wolff. 2003. “Oscillatory thermomechanical instability of an ultrathin catalyst.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 300(5627):1932–1936.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Perez, A. 2013. IP, Ethernet and MPLS Networks. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Gendler, R. 2011. Treasures of the Southern Sky L. L. Christensen and D. Malin, eds. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Sun, Z., and E.-P. Lim. 2006. “INEXT: An Investigative Search Tool for Knowledge Extraction.” In H. Chen, F.-Y. Wang, C. C. Yang, D. Zeng, M. Chau, and K. Chang, eds. Intelligence and Security Informatics: International Workshop, WISI 2006, Singapore, April 9, 2006. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 31–37.

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. 2015. “Is The Solid Crust In North America Really So Stable?” IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/solid-crust-north-america-really-so-stable/ [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. 1998. “Month In Review: December 1998: Reports, Testimony, Correspondence, and Other Publications.” No. OPA-99-3, 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

Morrow, S.T. 2012. Coboundary theorems for collections of random variables with moment conditions. Doctoral dissertation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana 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, M. 1992. “Newly Selected Chief of Staff Is Widely Known for Loyalty.” New York Times:134.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gould 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Gould 2014; Heilbron and Bynum 2001).

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

Two authors: (Heilbron and Bynum 2001)
Three authors: (Aitken, Jones and Larter 2004)
4 or more authors: (Cirak et al. 2003)

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

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