How to format your references using the Contemporary Arab Affairs citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Contemporary Arab Affairs. 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

Lehmann, Johannes. 2007. “A Handful of Carbon.” Nature 447 (7141): 143–144.

A journal article with 2 authors

Elsner, Christian, and Bernd Abel. 2014. “Ultrafast High-Resolution Mass Spectrometric Finger Pore Imaging in Latent Finger Prints.” Scientific Reports 4 (November): 6905.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yang, Ralph T., Arturo J. Hernández-Maldonado, and Frances H. Yang. 2003. “Desulfurization of Transportation Fuels with Zeolites under Ambient Conditions.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 301 (5629): 79–81.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Eldrett, James S., Ian C. Harding, Paul A. Wilson, Emily Butler, and Andrew P. Roberts. 2007. “Continental Ice in Greenland during the Eocene and Oligocene.” Nature 446 (7132): 176–179.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Islam, M. R., A. B. Chhetri, and M. M. Khan. 2010. The Greening of Petroleum Operations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Vinod Kumar, T. M., ed. 2015. E-Governance for Smart Cities. Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements. Singapore: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Hell, Rüdiger, and Markus Wirtz. 2008. “Metabolism of Cysteine in Plants and Phototrophic Bacteria.” In Sulfur Metabolism in Phototrophic Organisms, edited by Rüdiger Hell, Christiane Dahl, David Knaff, and Thomas Leustek, 59–91. Advances in Photosynthesis and Respiration. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Contemporary Arab Affairs.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2015. “New Research Yields Insight Into The Origins Of Consciousness.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-research-yields-insight-origins-awareness/.

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. Aviation Services: Automation and Consolidation of Flight Service Stations. RCED-88-77. 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

Singh, Akash. 2017. “Improving the Usability of Typometric Solutions.” Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: 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

Severson, Kim. 2007. “In Pursuit of Farm Fresh Flavor.” New York Times, August 19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lehmann 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Lehmann 2007; Elsner and Abel 2014).

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

Two authors: (Elsner and Abel 2014)
Three authors: (Yang, Hernández-Maldonado, and Yang 2003)
4 or more authors: (Eldrett et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Contemporary Arab Affairs
Abbreviation	Contemp. Arab Aff.
ISSN (print)	1755-0912
ISSN (online)	1755-0920
Scope	Cultural Studies Political Science and International Relations