How to format your references using the Early Childhood Education Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Early Childhood Education Journal. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Sigl, G. (2001). Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays: physics and astrophysics at extreme energies. Science (New York, N.Y.), 291(5501), 73–79.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fletcher, D. A., & Mullins, R. D. (2010). Cell mechanics and the cytoskeleton. Nature, 463(7280), 485–492.

A journal article with 3 authors

Schröter, C., Kosma, K., & Schultz, T. (2011). CRASY: mass- or electron-correlated rotational alignment spectroscopy. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333(6045), 1011–1015.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Rinaldi, S., Maioli, M., Pigliaru, G., Castagna, A., Santaniello, S., Basoli, V., et al. (2014). Stem cell senescence. Effects of REAC technology on telomerase-independent and telomerase-dependent pathways. Scientific reports, 4, 6373.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Beaumont, W. R. C. (2016). Electricity in fish research and management. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Hossain, M. A., Wani, S. H., Bhattacharjee, S., Burritt, D. J., & Tran, L.-S. P. (Eds.). (2016). Drought Stress Tolerance in Plants, Vol 2: Molecular and Genetic Perspectives. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Restrepo, D., Delay, R., Lin, W., López, F., & Bacigalupo, J. (2015). TRP Channels in Transduction for Responses to Odorants and Pheromones. In R. Madrid & J. Bacigalupo (Eds.), TRP Channels in Sensory Transduction (pp. 111–125). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Childhood Education Journal.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2014, August 18). Scientists Measure Rare Black Hole 400x The Size Of Our Sun. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/scientists-measure-rare-black-hole-400x-size-our-sun/. Accessed 30 October 2018

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. (1969). Internal Controls Over the Automatic Data Processing System Used by the Travelers Insurance Company in Making Medicare Payments (No. 092722). 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

Pan, Y. (2010). Long-Term Effects of Higher-Quality Early Childhood Education for At-Risk Children on Their Later Development and Resilience (Doctoral dissertation). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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

Sutherland, J. (2016, October 28). He Loved Opium, Murder and Wordsworth. New York Times, p. BR22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sigl 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Fletcher and Mullins 2010; Sigl 2001).

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

Two authors: (Fletcher and Mullins 2010)
Three or more authors: (Rinaldi et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Early Childhood Education Journal
Abbreviation	Early Child. Educ. J.
ISSN (print)	1082-3301
ISSN (online)	1573-1707
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Education