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

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

1. Tucker, B.E. (2013). Geophysics. Reducing earthquake risk. Science 341, 1070–1072.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Sheffield, M.E.J., and Dombeck, D.A. (2015). Calcium transient prevalence across the dendritic arbour predicts place field properties. Nature 517, 200–204.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Czaplicka, A., Holyst, J.A., and Sloot, P.M.A. (2013). Noise enhances information transfer in hierarchical networks. Sci. Rep. 3, 1223.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

1. Jiang, S.-Y., Pi, D.-H., Heubeck, C., Frimmel, H., Liu, Y.-P., Deng, H.-L., Ling, H.-F., and Yang, J.-H. (2009). Early Cambrian ocean anoxia in South China. Nature 459, E5-6; discussion E6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Rapaport, H. (2011). The Literary Theory Toolkit (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

1. (2006). Algebra, Meaning, and Computation: Essays dedicated to Joseph A. Goguen on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

1. Wood, B. (2008). Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark. In Elwyn Simons: A Search for Origins, J.G. Fleagle, and C.C. Gilbert, eds. (New York, NY: Springer), pp. 19–33.

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 Human Genetics.

Blog post

1. Andrew, E. (2015). We Found Only One-Third Of Published Psychology Research Is Reliable – Now What? (IFLScience).

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

1. Government Accountability Office (1977). Computer Operations and Data Processing Activities at the Social Security Administration (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

1. Chung, D. (2017). Health Information Infrastructure: Flows and Frictions. Doctoral dissertation. 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

1. Greenhouse, L. (2007). Justices, 5 to 4, Overturn 3 Texas Death Sentences. New York Times A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Human Genetics
Abbreviation	Am. J. Hum. Genet.
ISSN (print)	0002-9297
ISSN (online)	1537-6605
Scope	Genetics Genetics(clinical)

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