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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Coleman, P. 2000. “Superconductivity. On the Verge of Magnetism.” Nature 406 (6796): 580–581.
A journal article with 2 authors
Bravo-Abad, Jorge, and Marin Soljacić. 2008. “Physics. A Unified Picture of Laser Physics.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 320 (5876): 623–624.
A journal article with 3 authors
Goldman, Yale E., Clara Franzini-Armstrong, and Clay M. Armstrong. 2012. “Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917-2012).” Nature 486 (7404): 474.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Rosenthal, Anja, Gregory M. Yaxley, David H. Green, Joerg Hermann, István Kovács, and Carl Spandler. 2014. “Continuous Eclogite Melting and Variable Refertilisation in Upwelling Heterogeneous Mantle.” Scientific Reports 4 (August): 6099.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Storhas, Winfried. 2013. Bioverfahrensentwicklung. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
An edited book
Hwang, Yoon-Suk. 2015. A Mindfulness Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: New Directions in Research and Practice. Edited by Patrick Kearney. 1st ed. 2015. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
A chapter in an edited book
Nishide, Takashi, and Kouichi Sakurai. 2011. “Distributed Paillier Cryptosystem without Trusted Dealer.” In Information Security Applications: 11th International Workshop, WISA 2010, Jeju Island, Korea, August 24-26, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, edited by Yongwha Chung and Moti Yung, 44–60. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Journal of African Cultural Studies.

Blog post
Fang, Janet. 2014. “This 500-Pound ‘Iron Man’ Suit Is Ready for Deep Sea Diving.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/500-pound-iron-man-suit-ready-deep-sea-diving/.

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. 2011. Space Research: Content and Coordination of Space Science and Technology Strategy Need to Be More Robust. GAO-11-722. 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
Pitron, John Edward. 2008. “The Influence of Exemplary Followership on Organizational Performance: A Phenomenological Approach.” Doctoral dissertation, Phoenix, AZ: University of Phoenix.

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
Lee, Linda. 2009. “Ducking In and Out.” 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 (Coleman 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Coleman 2000; Bravo-Abad and Soljacić 2008).

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

  • Two authors: (Bravo-Abad and Soljacić 2008)
  • Three authors: (Goldman, Franzini-Armstrong, and Armstrong 2012)
  • 4 or more authors: (Rosenthal et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournal of African Cultural Studies
AbbreviationJ. Afr. Cult. Stud.
ISSN (print)1369-6815
ISSN (online)1469-9346
ScopeLanguage and Linguistics
Literature and Literary Theory
Music
Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Linguistics and Language
Cultural Studies

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