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

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

Hurles M. Are 100,000 “SNPs” useless? Science. 2002;298(5598):1509; author reply 1509.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dekel E, Alon U. Optimality and evolutionary tuning of the expression level of a protein. Nature. 2005;436(7050):588–592.

A journal article with 3 authors

Clutton-Brock TH, Coulson T, Milner JM. Red deer stocks in the Highlands of Scotland. Nature. 2004;429(6989):261–262.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Schneider R, Ferrara A, Salvaterra R, et al. Low-mass relics of early star formation. Nature. 2003;422(6934):869–871.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Raymond SU. Recession, Recovery, and Renewal: Long-Term Nonprofit Strategies for Rapid Economic Change. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2013.

An edited book

Amir A, Parida L, eds. Combinatorial Pattern Matching: 21st Annual Symposium, CPM 2010, New York, NY, USA, June 21-23, 2010. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2010 XIII, 362 p. 84 illus p.

A chapter in an edited book

Merkulovs D, Dekhtyar Y, Vilitis O, et al. Cylindrical Cell-Based Refractometers to Analyse Biomedical Liquids. In: Jobbágy Á, ed. First European Biomedical Engineering Conference for Young Investigators: ENCY2015, Budapest, May 28 - 30, 2015. Singapore: Springer; 2015:16–19.

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 Epidemiology.

Blog post

Taub B. A New Type Of Phantom Memory Has Been Found In The Human Brain. IFLScience. 2016;(https://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-type-phantom-memory-found-human-brain/). (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. Federal Research: Observations on the Small Business Innovation Research Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2005.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Sanford R. Framing Human Trafficking: A Content Analysis of Newspaper Articles from 2012 and 2013 [Doctoral dissertation]. Washington, DC: George Washington University; 2015.

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

Otis J. Her Peers Made School Look Easy. With Hard Work, She’s Catching Up. New York Times. 2017;A17.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (1).
This sentence cites two references (1,2).
This sentence cites four references (1–4).

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Epidemiology
Abbreviation	Am. J. Epidemiol.
ISSN (print)	0002-9262
ISSN (online)	1476-6256
Scope	Epidemiology

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