How to format your references using the American Journal of Community Psychology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Community Psychology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Crous, C. J. (2014). Judge research impact on a local scale. Nature, 513(7516), 7.
A journal article with 2 authors
Rabinowitz, J. D., & White, E. (2010). Autophagy and metabolism. Science (New York, N.Y.), 330(6009), 1344–1348.
A journal article with 3 authors
Stollewerk, A., Schoppmeier, M., & Damen, W. G. M. (2003). Involvement of Notch and Delta genes in spider segmentation. Nature, 423(6942), 863–865.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Pham, N. H., Ohya, S., Tanaka, M., Barnes, S. E., & Maekawa, S. (2009). Electromotive force and huge magnetoresistance in magnetic tunnel junctions. Nature, 458(7237), 489–492.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Rowlinson, M. (2010). A Practical Guide to the NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
An edited book
Friedrich, G., Helmert, M., & Wotawa, F. (Eds.). (2016). KI 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 39th Annual German Conference on AI, Klagenfurt, Austria, September 26-30, 2016, Proceedings (Vol. 9904). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Héritier, M. (2008). Cascade of FISDW Phases: Wave Vector Quantization and its Consequences. In A. Lebed (Ed.), The Physics of Organic Superconductors and Conductors (pp. 41–45). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Community Psychology.

Blog post
Hamilton, K. (2015, January 31). What The Color Of Your Snot Says About Your Health. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/decoding-snot-what-color-says-about-your-health/. Accessed 30 October 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. (2004). Information Technology: The Federal Enterprise Architecture and Agencies’ Enterprise Architectures Are Still Maturing (No. GAO-04-798T). Washington, DC: 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
Chitrampalam, P. (2009). Biological control of lettuce drop caused by Sclerotinia spp. using Coniothyrium minitans and elucidation of biochemical interactions during mycoparasitism (Doctoral dissertation). University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

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
Hodgman, J. (2017, June 16). Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman. New York Times, p. MM18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Crous 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Crous 2014; Rabinowitz and White 2010).

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

  • Two authors: (Rabinowitz and White 2010)
  • Three or more authors: (Pham et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal titleAmerican Journal of Community Psychology
AbbreviationAm. J. Community Psychol.
ISSN (print)0091-0562
ISSN (online)1573-2770
ScopePublic Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Applied Psychology
Health(social science)

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