How to format your references using the Early Child Development and Care citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Early Child Development and Care. 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

Triendl, R. (2000). Reactor refit ignites debate on Japan’s fusion strategy. Nature, 407(6804), 549.

A journal article with 2 authors

Soubeyrand, B., & Plotkin, S. A. (2002). Microbial evolution: antitoxin vaccines and pathogen virulence. Nature, 417(6889), 609–610; discussion 610.

A journal article with 3 authors

Winter, S. S., Clark, B. J., & Taube, J. S. (2015). Spatial navigation. Disruption of the head direction cell network impairs the parahippocampal grid cell signal. Science (New York, N.Y.), 347(6224), 870–874.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Wettey, F. R., Hawkins, S. F. C., Stewart, A., Luzio, J. P., Howard, J. C., & Jackson, A. P. (2002). Controlled elimination of clathrin heavy-chain expression in DT40 lymphocytes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5586), 1521–1525.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ko, C. J., & Barr, R. J. (2011). Dermatopathology. Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Daniels, J. M., & Hoppmann, R. A. (Eds.). (2016). Practical Point-of-Care Medical Ultrasound (1st ed. 2016). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

de Chiara, C., & Pastore, A. (2011). Polyglutamine Diseases and Neurodegeneration: The Example of Ataxin-1. In J. Brnjas-Kraljević & G. Pifat-Mrzljak (Eds.), Supramolecular Structure and Function 10 (pp. 87–99). 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 Early Child Development and Care.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2016, June 13). Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Discovered In Rio de Janeiro Waterways Ahead Of Olymics. 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. (1982). Federal Information Systems Remain Highly Vulnerable to Fraudulent, Wasteful, Abusive, and Illegal Practices (MASAD-82-18). 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

Oparnica, D. (2013). The role of nurses in health care reform: A project report [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

Murphy, M. J. O. (2015, October 2). Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of The New York Times. New York Times, C30.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Triendl, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Soubeyrand & Plotkin, 2002; Triendl, 2000).

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

Two authors: (Soubeyrand & Plotkin, 2002)
Three authors: (Winter et al., 2015)
6 or more authors: (Wettey et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Early Child Development and Care
Abbreviation	Early Child Dev. Care
ISSN (print)	0300-4430
ISSN (online)	1476-8275
Scope	Pediatrics Developmental and Educational Psychology Social Psychology