How to format your references using the Early Childhood Research Quarterly citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 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

Gavaghan, H. (2000). European industry turns to the academics to secure its future. Nature, 406(6797), 809–811.

A journal article with 2 authors

Peters, S. E., & Gaines, R. R. (2012). Formation of the “Great Unconformity” as a trigger for the Cambrian explosion. Nature, 484(7394), 363–366.

A journal article with 3 authors

Pfleiderer, C., Julian, S. R., & Lonzarich, G. G. (2001). Non-Fermi-liquid nature of the normal state of itinerant-electron ferromagnets. Nature, 414(6862), 427–430.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Khalifah, P., Nelson, K. D., Jin, R., Mao, Z. Q., Liu, Y., Huang, Q., Gao, X. P., Ramirez, A. P., & Cava, R. J. (2001). Non-Fermi-liquid behaviour in La4Ru6O19. Nature, 411(6838), 669–671.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chin, D. A. (2006). Water-Quality Engineering in Natural Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Boavida, F., Monteiro, E., Mascolo, S., & Koucheryavy, Y. (Eds.). (2007). Wired/Wireless Internet Communications: 5th International Conference, WWIC 2007, Coimbra, Portugal, May 23-25, 2007. Proceedings (Vol. 4517). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Mastrolia, P., Rigoli, M., & Setti, A. G. (2012). Uniqueness. In M. Rigoli & A. G. Setti (Eds.), Yamabe-type Equations on Complete, Noncompact Manifolds (pp. 127–155). 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 Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, June 4). Seven Teeny Tiny Species Of Frog Discovered In Brazil. 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. (1976). Uses of Minicomputers in the Federal Government: Trends, Benefits, and Problems (FGMSD-75-53). 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

Zurheide, P. K. (2009). Hydromorphology of anomalous bright loamy soils on the mid-Atlantic coastal plain [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Billard, M. (2010, August 12). Cousin Fran. New York Times, E5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gavaghan, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Gavaghan, 2000; Peters & Gaines, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Peters & Gaines, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Khalifah et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Early Childhood Research Quarterly
Abbreviation	Early Child. Res. Q.
ISSN (print)	0885-2006
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Education Sociology and Political Science