How to format your references using the Journal of Computers in Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Computers in Education. 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

Watanabe, M. (2003). Small world, big hopes. Nature, 426(6965), 478–479.

A journal article with 2 authors

Parmesan, C., & Yohe, G. (2003). A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems. Nature, 421(6918), 37–42.

A journal article with 3 authors

de Jong, P. W., van Lenteren, J. C., & Raak-van den Berg, C. L. (2013). Comment on “Invasive harlequin ladybird carries biological weapons against native competitors.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 341(6152), 1342.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Dutt, M. V. G., Childress, L., Jiang, L., Togan, E., Maze, J., Jelezko, F., et al. (2007). Quantum register based on individual electronic and nuclear spin qubits in diamond. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316(5829), 1312–1316.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barton, L. L., & Northup, D. E. (2011). Microbial Ecology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Stary, C. (Ed.). (2012). S-BPM ONE – Scientific Research: 4th International Conference, S-BPM ONE 2012, Vienna, Austria, April 4-5, 2012. Proceedings (Vol. 104). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Hoffstein, J., Pipher, J., & Silverman, J. H. (2014). Digital Signatures. In J. Pipher & J. H. Silverman (Eds.), An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography (pp. 193–205). New York, NY: 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 Computers in Education.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, November 13). Scientist At Work: Searching For Tiny Neutrinos In The South Pole’s Thick Ice. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/scientist-work-searching-tiny-neutrinos-south-pole-s-thick-ice/. 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. (1988). Summer Youth Jobs Program: Congressional Action Has Increased Emphasis on Remedial Education (No. HRD-88-118). 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

Douville, S. (2014). The lived experience of being a European wife to a U.S. Marine: A heuristic study (Doctoral dissertation). Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

Barron, J. (2016, November 19). Donald Trump Hits the Town. New York Times, p. A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Watanabe 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Parmesan and Yohe 2003; Watanabe 2003).

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

Two authors: (Parmesan and Yohe 2003)
Three or more authors: (Dutt et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Computers in Education
Abbreviation	J. Comput. Educ.
ISSN (print)	2197-9987
ISSN (online)	2197-9995
Scope