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

Kress, Moshe. 2012. “Modeling Armed Conflicts.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 336 (6083): 865–869.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kemp, Charles, and Terry Regier. 2012. “Kinship Categories across Languages Reflect General Communicative Principles.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 336 (6084): 1049–1054.

A journal article with 3 authors

Tobler, Philippe N., Christopher D. Fiorillo, and Wolfram Schultz. 2005. “Adaptive Coding of Reward Value by Dopamine Neurons.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 307 (5715): 1642–1645.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Islam, Md Rafiqul, Kenta Nakamura, Martin Miguel Casco-Robles, Ailidana Kunahong, Wataru Inami, Fubito Toyama, Fumiaki Maruo, and Chikafumi Chiba. 2014. “The Newt Reprograms Mature RPE Cells into a Unique Multipotent State for Retinal Regeneration.” Scientific Reports 4 (August): 6043.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Franssen, Jean-Marc, and Paulo Vila Real. 2016. Fire Design of Steel Structures. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Harrison, Daniel J., Angela K. Fuller, and Gilbert Proulx, eds. 2005. Martens and Fishers (Martes) in Human-Altered Environments: An International Perspective. Boston, MA: Springer US.

A chapter in an edited book

Deepak, P., and Prasad M. Deshpande. 2015. “Advanced Operators for Similarity Search.” In Operators for Similarity Search: Semantics, Techniques and Usage Scenarios, edited by Prasad M. Deshpande, 55–89. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. 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

Hamilton, Kristy. 2015. “This Nonstick, No Waste Coating Is Sliding Into The Marketplace.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/nonstick-no-waste-coating-sliding-marketplace/.

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. 2013. Human Services: Sustained and Coordinated Efforts Could Facilitate Data Sharing While Protecting Privacy. GAO-13-106. 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

Whited, Jennifer E. 2015. “An Investigation of Struggling Learners’ Motivation to Read.” 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

Eligon, John. 2014. “Undercover TV Reports on School Security Raise Ethical Questions.” New York Times, March 17.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kress 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Kress 2012; Kemp and Regier 2012).

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

Two authors: (Kemp and Regier 2012)
Three authors: (Tobler, Fiorillo, and Schultz 2005)
4 or more authors: (Islam 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

Research and Writing Guides