How to format your references using the American Mineralogist citation style

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

Smaglik, P. (2005) French lessons. Nature, 435, 849.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yue, Y., and Angell, C.A. (2004) Clarifying the glass-transition behaviour of water by comparison with hyperquenched inorganic glasses. Nature, 427, 717–720.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mayya, A., Banerjee, A., and Rajesh, R. (2013) Mammalian cortical bone in tension is non-Haversian. Scientific reports, 3, 2533.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Zielke, N., Kim, K.J., Tran, V., Shibutani, S.T., Bravo, M.-J., Nagarajan, S., van Straaten, M., Woods, B., von Dassow, G., Rottig, C., and others (2011) Control of Drosophila endocycles by E2F and CRL4(CDT2). Nature, 480, 123–127.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

O’Neil, P.V. (2008) Beginning Partial Differential Equations. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Keating, M. (2007) Low Power Methodology Manual: For System-on-Chip Design, XVI, 300 p p. (D. Flynn, R. Aitken, A. Gibbons, & K. Shi, Eds.). Springer US, Boston, MA.

A chapter in an edited book

Coutinho, F.Â., El-Hani, C.N., and Mortimer, E.F. (2014) Building a Profile for the Biological Concept of Life. In E.F. Mortimer and C.N. El-Hani, Eds., Conceptual Profiles: A Theory of Teaching and Learning Scientific Concepts pp. 115–142. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

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 Mineralogist.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014, November 12) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a Sunburn. IFLScience. 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

Government Accountability Office (2007) Commercial Aviation: Potential Safety and Capacity Issues Associated with the Introduction of the New A380 Aircraft. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Graber, M.E. (2013) Best practices in enhancement deals: Nonprofit and for profit theatrical collaborations. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Healy, J., and Kovaleski, S.F. (2014, April 27) One Mother, 7 Dead Newborns and a Stunned Community in Utah. New York Times, p. A18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Yue and Angell 2004; Smaglik 2005).

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

Two authors: (Yue and Angell 2004)
Three or more authors: (Zielke et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	American Mineralogist
Abbreviation	Am. Mineral.
ISSN (print)	0003-004X
Scope	Geochemistry and Petrology Geophysics