How to format your references using the International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Nattel, S. (2002). New ideas about atrial fibrillation 50 years on. Nature, 415(6868), 219–226.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kleckner, D., & Bouwmeester, D. (2006). Sub-kelvin optical cooling of a micromechanical resonator. Nature, 444(7115), 75–78.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rocha, P. P., Chaumeil, J., & Skok, J. A. (2013). Molecular biology. Finding the right partner in a 3D genome. Science (New York, N.Y.), 342(6164), 1333–1334.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

He, H., Wang, Y., Ma, Q., Ma, J., Chu, B., Ji, D., Tang, G., Liu, C., Zhang, H., & Hao, J. (2014). Mineral dust and NOx promote the conversion of SO2 to sulfate in heavy pollution days. Scientific Reports, 4, 4172.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chiasson, A. D. (2016). Geothermal Heat Pump and Heat Engine Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Shibuya, T., Kashima, H., Sese, J., & Ahmad, S. (Eds.). (2012). Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics: 7th IAPR International Conference, PRIB 2012, Tokyo, Japan, November 8-10, 2012. Proceedings (Vol. 7632). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Matwin, S., Nin, J., Sehatkar, M., & Szapiro, T. (2015). A Review of Attribute Disclosure Control. In G. Navarro-Arribas & V. Torra (Eds.), Advanced Research in Data Privacy (pp. 41–61). 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 International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2016, June 24). The Science Behind How We Became Human. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/the-science-behind-how-we-became-human/

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. (2009). Polar-Orbiting Satellites: With Costs Increasing and Data Continuity at Risk, Improvements Needed in Tri-agency Decision Making (GAO-09-772T). 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

Herron, J. (2017). The Use of Evidence Based Interventions in the Classroom for Students with Disabilities [Doctoral dissertation]. Northcentral 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

Sanger, D. E., Mazzetti, M., & Hubbard, B. (2016, September 19). Errant Strike Impairs Effort to Calm Syria. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Nattel, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Kleckner & Bouwmeester, 2006; Nattel, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Kleckner & Bouwmeester, 2006)
Three or more authors: (He et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	International Journal of Africa Nursing Sciences
ISSN (print)	2214-1391
Scope	General Nursing