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

Ruan, Yijun. 2011. “Genome-Sequencing Anniversary. Presenting the Human Genome: Now in 3D!” Science (New York, N.Y.) 331 (6020): 1025–1026.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kassiotis, George, and Anne O’Garra. 2008. “Immunology. Immunity Benefits from a Little Suppression.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 320 (5880): 1168–1169.

A journal article with 3 authors

Royer, Dana L., Robert A. Berner, and Jeffrey Park. 2007. “Climate Sensitivity Constrained by CO2 Concentrations over the Past 420 Million Years.” Nature 446 (7135): 530–532.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Choi, Seung Hee, Do Young Hyeon, Ll Hwan Lee, Su Jin Park, Seungmin Han, In Chul Lee, Daehee Hwang, and Hong Gil Nam. 2014. “Gene Duplication of Type-B ARR Transcription Factors Systematically Extends Transcriptional Regulatory Structures in Arabidopsis.” Scientific Reports 4 (November): 7197.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alberty, Robert A. 2005. Thermodynamics of Biochemical Reactions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Hepp, Martin, and Yigal Hoffner, eds. 2014. E-Commerce and Web Technologies: 15th International Conference, EC-Web 2014, Munich, Germany, September 1-4, 2014. Proceedings. Vol. 188. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Theoharis, Theoharis. 2009. “3D Object Retrieval: Inter-Class vs. Intra-Class.” In Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Computer Graphics, edited by Dimitri Plemenos and Georgios Miaoulis, 55–66. Studies in Computational Intelligence. 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

Carpineti, Alfredo. 2017. “Scientists Crack The Secret To Graphene’s Superconductivity.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/scientists-crack-the-secret-to-graphene-s-superconductivity/.

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. 2001. Critical Infrastructure Protection: Significant Challenges in Protecting Federal Systems and Developing Analysis and Warning Capabilities. GAO-01-1132T. 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

Dunn, Denise Nicole. 2015. “Non-Athlete Students’ Attitudes toward Student-Athletes: A Social Identity Approach.” Doctoral dissertation, Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana.

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

Kimmelman, Michael. 2017. “Who Will Fix Penn Station?” New York Times, April 30.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ruan 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Ruan 2011; Kassiotis and O’Garra 2008).

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

Two authors: (Kassiotis and O’Garra 2008)
Three authors: (Royer, Berner, and Park 2007)
4 or more authors: (Choi et al. 2014)

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