How to format your references using the International Journal of Early Childhood citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Early Childhood (IJEC). 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

Carroll, S. B. (2001). The big picture. Nature, 409(6821), 669.

A journal article with 2 authors

Simon, J., & Greiner, M. (2012). Condensed-matter physics: a duo of graphene mimics. Nature, 483(7389), 282–284.

A journal article with 3 authors

Li, J., Han, D., & Zhao, Y.-P. (2014). Kinetic behaviour of the cells touching substrate: the interfacial stiffness guides cell spreading. Scientific reports, 4, 3910.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Chai, Q., Arndt, J. W., Dong, M., Tepp, W. H., Johnson, E. A., Chapman, E. R., & Stevens, R. C. (2006). Structural basis of cell surface receptor recognition by botulinum neurotoxin B. Nature, 444(7122), 1096–1100.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jayaweera, S. K. (2014). Signal Processing for Cognitive Radios. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Brat, G., Rungta, N., & Venet, A. (Eds.). (2013). NASA Formal Methods: 5th International Symposium, NFM 2013, Moffett Field, CA, USA, May 14-16, 2013. Proceedings (Vol. 7871). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Moeskopf, E., & Feenstra, F. (2008). Introduction to Rapid Prototyping. In V. Raja & K. J. Fernandes (Eds.), Reverse Engineering: An Industrial Perspective (pp. 99–117). London: 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 International Journal of Early Childhood.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, August 9). Watch This Lightning Strike In Slow Motion. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/video-lightning-slowly-striking-fascinating/. Accessed 30 October 2018

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. (1992). High Risk Series: Guaranteed Student Loans (No. HR-93-2). 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

Tucker, M. S. (2010). Phenotypic and genotypic analysis of in vitro selected artemisinin resistant Plasmodium falciparum (Doctoral dissertation). University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

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

Saslow, L. (2007, June 3). It’s Not Their Party, but They’ll Still Take Levy. New York Times, p. LI2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Carroll 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Carroll 2001; Simon and Greiner 2012).

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

Two authors: (Simon and Greiner 2012)
Three or more authors: (Chai et al. 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	International Journal of Early Childhood
Abbreviation	Int. J. Early Child.
ISSN (print)	0020-7187
ISSN (online)	1878-4658
Scope	Developmental and Educational Psychology Education