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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for American Journal of Health Behavior (AJHB). 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

Bacon D. Physics. Does our universe allow for robust quantum computation? Science 2007;317:1876–1877.

A journal article with 2 authors

Geschwind DH, Konopka G. Neuroscience in the era of functional genomics and systems biology. Nature 2009;461:908–915.

A journal article with 3 authors

Béarez P, DeVries TJ, Ortlieb L. Comment on “Otolith delta18O record of mid-Holocene sea surface temperatures in Peru.” Science 2003;299:203; author reply 203.

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Thier P, Dicke PW, Haas R, Barash S. Encoding of movement time by populations of cerebellar Purkinje cells. Nature 2000;405:72–76.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dinçer İ, Zamfirescu C. Drying Phenomena. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2015.

An edited book

Lenaerts B. Omnidirectional Inductive Powering for Biomedical Implants. Puers R, (Ed). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

Chen J, Shanker VK. Automated Extraction of Tags from the Penn Treebank. In Bunt H, Carroll J, Satta G, (Eds) New Developments in Parsing Technology. Text, Speech and Language Technology. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands 2005:73–89.

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 Health Behavior.

Blog post

Hamilton K. Jet Stream Propels Commercial Plane Across Atlantic In Record Time. IFLScience 2015. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/commercial-plane-reaches-near-supersonic-speeds-during-flight-london/. 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. Telecommunications: GSA Has Made Progress Planning for a New Governmentwide Program, But Critical Issues Remain. 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

Rosenfeld EG. The ascent of women to senior leadership positions in the financial services industry: A phenomenological study. 2009.

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

Leland J. Life Among the Boldface Names. New York Times. July 28, 2017:MB1.

In-text citations

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

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 Health Behavior
Abbreviation	Am. J. Health Behav.
ISSN (print)	1945-7359
Scope	Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health Social Psychology Health(social science)