How to format your references using the Computers and Composition citation style

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

Marx, V. (2015). Tissue engineering: Organs from the lab. Nature, 522(7556), 373–377.

A journal article with 2 authors

Juliano, C., & Wessel, G. (2010). Developmental biology. Versatile germline genes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 329(5992), 640–641.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lyons, T. W., Reinhard, C. T., & Planavsky, N. J. (2014). The rise of oxygen in Earth’s early ocean and atmosphere. Nature, 506(7488), 307–315.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Pais-Vieira, M., Lebedev, M., Kunicki, C., Wang, J., & Nicolelis, M. A. L. (2013). A brain-to-brain interface for real-time sharing of sensorimotor information. Scientific Reports, 3, 1319.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ruiz, J.-L. (2017). Supra-Gingival Minimally Invasive Dentistry. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Golinska, P., & Hajdul, M. (Eds.). (2012). Sustainable Transport: New Trends and Business Practices. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Abdelgawad, A., & Bayoumi, M. (2012). Kalman Filter. In M. Bayoumi (Ed.), Resource-Aware Data Fusion Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks (pp. 59–76). Springer US.

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 Computers and Composition.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2017, May 22). Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/google-ai-creating-own-ai/

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. (1988). National Aero-Space Plane: A Technology Development and Demonstration Program To Build the X-30 (NSIAD-88-122). 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

Banerjee, S. (2013). A mathematical model for the transition in firing patterns across puberty of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone neuron [Doctoral dissertation]. Ohio State 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

Nagourney, A., Lovett, I., & Pérez-Peña, R. (2015, December 2). Shooting Rampage Sows Terror in California. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Marx, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Juliano & Wessel, 2010; Marx, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Juliano & Wessel, 2010)
Three authors: (Lyons et al., 2014)
6 or more authors: (Pais-Vieira et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Computers and Composition
Abbreviation	Comput. Compos.
ISSN (print)	8755-4615
Scope	Language and Linguistics General Computer Science Education Linguistics and Language