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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Keil, F. C. (2011). Psychology. Science starts early. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331(6020), 1022–1023.

A journal article with 2 authors

Luo, C., & Ecker, J. R. (2015). Epigenetics. Exceptional epigenetics in the brain. Science (New York, N.Y.), 348(6239), 1094–1095.

A journal article with 3 authors

Melendez, I., Grice, K., & Schwark, L. (2013). Exceptional preservation of Palaeozoic steroids in a diagenetic continuum. Scientific Reports, 3, 2768.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Lawrence, A., Clark, L., Labuzetta, J. N., Sahakian, B., & Vyakarnum, S. (2008). The innovative brain. Nature, 456(7219), 168–169.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Daïan, J.-F. (2014). Equilibrium and Transfer in Porous Media 2. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Joye, M., Mukhopadhyay, D., & Tunstall, M. (Eds.). (2011). Security Aspects in Information Technology: First International Conference, InfoSecHiComNet 2011, Haldia, India, October 19-22, 2011. Proceedings (Vol. 7011). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Gorzałczany, M. B., & Rudziński, F. (2008). WWW-Newsgroup-Document Clustering by Means of Dynamic Self-organizing Neural Networks. In L. Rutkowski, R. Tadeusiewicz, L. A. Zadeh, & J. M. Zurada (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing – ICAISC 2008: 9th International Conference Zakopane, Poland, June 22-26, 2008 Proceedings (pp. 40–51). 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 Computers and Composition.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. (2016, June 29). Why You Should Care About Asteroid Day 2016. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/why-you-should-care-about-asteroid-day-2016-tomorrow/

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. (2014). Federal Software Licenses: Better Management Needed to Achieve Significant Savings Government-Wide (GAO-14-413). 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

Quiroz, C. A. (2012). A community risk assessment of 90032 [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Walsh, M. W. (2012, March 27). New Ideas On Pensions: Use States. New York Times, B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Keil, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Keil, 2011; Luo & Ecker, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Luo & Ecker, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Lawrence et al., 2008)

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