How to format your references using the Early Years citation style

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

Stewart, A. Keith. 2014. “Medicine. How Thalidomide Works against Cancer.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 343 (6168): 256–257.

A journal article with 2 authors

Atkins, J. F., and R. F. Gesteland. 2001. “MRNA Readout at 40.” Nature 414 (6865): 693.

A journal article with 3 authors

Omabegho, Tosan, Ruojie Sha, and Nadrian C. Seeman. 2009. “A Bipedal DNA Brownian Motor with Coordinated Legs.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 324 (5923): 67–71.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Kobayashi, Takahiko, Fumiaki Nagase, Kohji Hotta, and Kotaro Oka. 2013. “Crosstalk between Second Messengers Predicts the Motility of the Growth Cone.” Scientific Reports 3 (November): 3118.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Grous, Ammar. 2012. Fracture Mechanics 1. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

INDERJIT, and K. G. Mukerji, eds. 2006. Allelochemicals: Biological Control of Plant Pathogens and Diseases. Vol. 2. Disease Management of Fruits and Vegetables. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Feng, Powei, Tao Ju, and Joe Warren. 2010. “Piecewise Tri-Linear Contouring for Multi-Material Volumes.” In Advances in Geometric Modeling and Processing: 6th International Conference, GMP 2010, Castro Urdiales, Spain, June 16-18, 2010. Proceedings, edited by Bernard Mourrain, Scott Schaefer, and Guoliang Xu, 43–56. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Years.

Blog post

Davis, Josh. 2015. “The Uncomfortable Truth About The Tiger Trade Ban.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/uncomfortable-truth-about-tiger-trade-ban/.

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. 1979. Army’s FY 1980 Programs for Procuring Conventional Ammunition, Modernization, and Expansion. LCD-79-416. 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

Racho, Maria Odiamar. 2012. “Attributes of Asian American Senior Leaders Who Have Retained Their Cultural Identity and Been Successful in American Corporations.” Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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

Greenhouse, Linda. 2006. “Justices Order Rethinking Of EBay Case.” New York Times, May 16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Stewart 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Stewart 2014; Atkins and Gesteland 2001).

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

Two authors: (Atkins and Gesteland 2001)
Three authors: (Omabegho, Sha, and Seeman 2009)
4 or more authors: (Kobayashi et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Early Years
Abbreviation	Early Years (Stoke-on-Trent)
ISSN (print)	0957-5146
ISSN (online)	1472-4421
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Education