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

Sukhdev, Pavan. 2012. “Sustainability: The Corporate Climate Overhaul.” Nature 486 (7401): 27–28.

A journal article with 2 authors

Blackburn, Elizabeth H., and Elissa S. Epel. 2012. “Telomeres and Adversity: Too Toxic to Ignore.” Nature 490 (7419): 169–171.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dudovich, Nirit, Dan Oron, and Yaron Silberberg. 2002. “Single-Pulse Coherently Controlled Nonlinear Raman Spectroscopy and Microscopy.” Nature 418 (6897): 512–514.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wang, Eric T., Rickard Sandberg, Shujun Luo, Irina Khrebtukova, Lu Zhang, Christine Mayr, Stephen F. Kingsmore, Gary P. Schroth, and Christopher B. Burge. 2008. “Alternative Isoform Regulation in Human Tissue Transcriptomes.” Nature 456 (7221): 470–476.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bell, Michael. 2016. Incremental Software Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Rehm, Georg, and Hans Uszkoreit, eds. 2012. The Basque Language in the Digital Age. White Paper Series. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Scales, Robert, and Matthew P. Buman. 2016. “Paradigms of Lifestyle Medicine and Wellness.” In Lifestyle Medicine: A Manual for Clinical Practice, edited by Jeffrey I. Mechanick and Robert F. Kushner, 29–40. 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 Years.

Blog post

Luntz, Stephen. 2014. “A Computer Has Reportedly Passed Turing Test For The First Time.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/computer-has-reportedly-passed-turing-test-first-time/.

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. Experimental Schools Program: Opportunities To Improve the Management of an Educational Research Program. MWD-76-64. 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

Warrick, Alyssa Diane. 2017. “‘Deep’ South: Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and Environmental Knowledge, 1800-1974.” Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State, MS: Mississippi State 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. 2008. “Justices Take Case on Navy Use of Sonar.” New York Times, June 24.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sukhdev 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Sukhdev 2012; Blackburn and Epel 2012).

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

Two authors: (Blackburn and Epel 2012)
Three authors: (Dudovich, Oron, and Silberberg 2002)
4 or more authors: (Wang et al. 2008)

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