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

Grayson, M. 2010. “Nutrigenomics.” Nature 468(7327):S1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fetler, L., and S. Amigorena. 2005. “Neuroscience. Brain under surveillance: the microglia patrol.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309(5733):392–393.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ledingham, K.W.D., P. McKenna, and R.P. Singhal. 2003. “Applications for nuclear phenomena generated by ultra-intense lasers.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 300(5622):1107–1111.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Parlati, F., J.A. McNew, R. Fukuda, R. Miller, T.H. Söllner, and J.E. Rothman. 2000. “Topological restriction of SNARE-dependent membrane fusion.” Nature 407(6801):194–198.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Balani, K., V. Verma, A. Agarwal, and R. Narayan. 2014. Biosurfaces. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Boffin, H.M.J., G. Carraro, and G. Beccari eds. 2015. Ecology of Blue Straggler Stars. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Beauville, A. 2007. “Sur les hypersurfaces dont les sections hyperplanes sont à module constant.” In P. Cartier, L. Illusie, N. M. Katz, G. Laumon, Y. I. Manin, and K. A. Ribet, eds. The Grothendieck Festschrift: A Collection of Articles Written in Honor of the 60th Birthday of Alexander Grothendieck. Progress in Mathematics. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, pp. 121–133.

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

Luntz, S. 2016. “Bad Times Make Pea Plants Gamble.” IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/bad-times-make-pea-plants-gamble/ [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. 1977. “Examination of the Pricing of a Negotiated Fixed-Price Incentive Contract Awarded on a Noncompetitive Basis.” No. 103244, 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

Patel, V.M. 2010. Sparse and redundant representations for inverse problems and recognition. Doctoral dissertation. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Cooper, M. 2017. “Putting the Passion of Opera Behind Bars.” New York Times:C7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Grayson 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Grayson 2010; Fetler and Amigorena 2005).

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

Two authors: (Fetler and Amigorena 2005)
Three authors: (Ledingham, McKenna and Singhal 2003)
4 or more authors: (Parlati et al. 2000)

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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