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

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

Ransohoff, David F. 2003. “Cancer. Developing Molecular Biomarkers for Cancer.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 299(5613): 1679–80.

A journal article with 2 authors

Myerson, Allan S., and Bernhardt L. Trout. 2013. “Chemistry. Nucleation from Solution.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 341(6148): 855–56.

A journal article with 3 authors

Suzuki, Genjiro, Naoyuki Shimazu, and Motomasa Tanaka. 2012. “A Yeast Prion, Mod5, Promotes Acquired Drug Resistance and Cell Survival under Environmental Stress.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 336(6079): 355–59.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Iber, Dagmar, Joanna Clarkson, Michael D. Yudkin, and Iain D. Campbell. 2006. “The Mechanism of Cell Differentiation in Bacillus Subtilis.” Nature 441(7091): 371–74.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ghavami, M., L. B. Michael, and R. Kohno. 2006. Ultra Wideband Signals and Systems in Communication Engineering. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Chen, Chen. 2016. Big Visual Data Analysis: Scene Classification and Geometric Labeling. editors. Y. Ren and . C.-C. J. Kuo. 1st ed. 2016. 1st ed. 2016. Singapore: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Gangadharan, Sridhar, and Sanjay Churiwala. 2013. “SDC Extensions Through Tcl.” Pp. 35–46 in Constraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis: A Practical Guide to Synopsys Design Constraints (SDC), edited by S. Churiwala. New York, NY: 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 Sociology.

Blog post

Hamilton, Kristy. 2014, November 26. “Peacock Spider Dances To YMCA”IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/peacock-spider-dances-ymca/. Accessed on 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. 1990. Drug Abuse: Research on Treatment May Not Address Current Needs. 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

Leung, Raymond. 2014. “The Effect of Mission Assurance on ELV Launch Success Rate: An Analysis of Two Management Systems for Launch Vehicles.” Doctoral dissertation. Washington, DC: George Washington 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

Brantley, Ben. 2017, September 27. “Remembering Mama, as She Forgets.” New York Times C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ransohoff 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Ransohoff 2003; Myerson and Trout 2013).

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

Two authors: (Myerson and Trout 2013)
Three or more authors: (Iber et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Journal of Sociology
ISSN (print)	0002-9602
ISSN (online)	1537-5390
Scope