How to format your references using the Journal of African Cultural Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of African Cultural Studies. 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

Sharkey, Noel. 2008. “Computer Science. The Ethical Frontiers of Robotics.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 322 (5909): 1800–1801.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wennerås, C., and A. Wold. 2000. “A Chair of One’s Own.” Nature 408 (6813): 647.

A journal article with 3 authors

Smith, Thomas M., Thomas R. Karl, and Richard W. Reynolds. 2002. “Climate Modeling. How Accurate Are Climate Simulations?” Science (New York, N.Y.) 296 (5567): 483–484.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Meng, Hao, Wen-Jie Xie, Zhi-Qiang Jiang, Boris Podobnik, Wei-Xing Zhou, and H. Eugene Stanley. 2014. “Systemic Risk and Spatiotemporal Dynamics of the US Housing Market.” Scientific Reports 4 (January): 3655.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McGee, Glenn. 2012. Bioethics for Beginners. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Besley, Timothy, ed. 2016. Contemporary Issues in Development Economics. International Economic Association Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

A chapter in an edited book

Kozioł, Anna. 2015. “E-Mail, Facebook, and Mobile Phones as Essential Tools for Lower Secondary School Students’ Communication.” In New Media and Perennial Problems in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, edited by Liliana Piasecka, Małgorzata Adams-Tukiendorf, and Przemysław Wilk, 73–90. Second Language Learning and Teaching. 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 Journal of African Cultural Studies.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2014. “Bizarre Cloud Formation Spotted In Australian Skies.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/stunning-cloud-formation-spotted-australian-skies/.

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. 1983. Vocational Education and the Robotics Revolution. 121707. 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

McFarland-Mancini, Molly. 2006. “Prolactin Production by Human Breast Adipose Tissue and Adipocytes.” Doctoral dissertation, Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati.

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

Winerip, Michael, and Michael Schwirtz. 2015. “Even as Many Eyes Watch, Brutality at Rikers Persists.” New York Times, February 22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sharkey 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Sharkey 2008; Wennerås and Wold 2000).

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

Two authors: (Wennerås and Wold 2000)
Three authors: (Smith, Karl, and Reynolds 2002)
4 or more authors: (Meng et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of African Cultural Studies
Abbreviation	J. Afr. Cult. Stud.
ISSN (print)	1369-6815
ISSN (online)	1469-9346
Scope	Language and Linguistics Literature and Literary Theory Music Visual Arts and Performing Arts Linguistics and Language Cultural Studies