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

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

Sifers, R. N., 2003, Cell biology. Protein degradation unlocked: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 299, p. 1330–1331.

A journal article with 2 authors

Shi, Q., and King, R. W., 2005, Chromosome nondisjunction yields tetraploid rather than aneuploid cells in human cell lines: Nature, v. 437, p. 1038–1042.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, X., Zhu, Y., and Granick, S., 2002, Hydrophobicity at a Janus interface: Science (New York, N.Y.), v. 295, p. 663–666.

A journal article with 15 or more authors

Jewell, J., McCollum, D., Emmerling, J., Bertram, C., Gernaat, D. E. H. J., Krey, V., Paroussos, L., Berger, L., Fragkiadakis, K., Keppo, I., Saadi, N., Tavoni, M., van Vuuren, D., Vinichenko, V., and others, 2018, Limited emission reductions from fuel subsidy removal except in energy-exporting regions: Nature, v. 554, p. 229–233.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Held, G., 2001, Bulletproofing TCP/IP-based Windows NT/2000 Networks: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Sukhoivanov, I. A., 2009, Photonic Crystals: Physics and Practical Modeling (I. V. Guryev, Ed.): Springer Series in Optical Sciences, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, XIX, 242 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Hamied, F. A., 2012, English in Multicultural and Multilingual Indonesian Education, in Kirkpatrick, A. and Sussex, R. eds., English as an International Language in Asia: Implications for Language Education: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, p. 63–78.

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 Science.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J., 2015, Huge Announcement From SpaceX Coming Soon, Possibly Regarding A Future Mars Mission, accessed October 30, 2018, at IFLScience at https://www.iflscience.com/space/huge-spacex-announcement-coming-soon-could-be-mars-mission/.

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, 1979, The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Professional Standards Review Organization Program: U.S. Government Printing Office 109829.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Becker, L. A., 2010, Noncredit to credit transitions: The role of cultural capital and habitus for adult immigrant learners in the community college:

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

Pilon, M., 2013, Quiet Campaigns Begin For Presidency of I.O.C: New York Times, p. D1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sifers, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Shi and King, 2005; Sifers, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Shi and King, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Jewell and others, 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Science
Abbreviation	Am. J. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0002-9599
ISSN (online)	1945-452x
Scope	General Earth and Planetary Sciences