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

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

Macfadden, Bruce J. 2005. “Evolution. Fossil Horses--Evidence for Evolution.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 307 (5716): 1728–1730.

A journal article with 2 authors

Davis, Steven J., and Christine Shearer. 2014. “Climate Change: A Crack in the Natural-Gas Bridge.” Nature 514 (7523): 436–437.

A journal article with 3 authors

Halberda, Justin, Michèle M. M. Mazzocco, and Lisa Feigenson. 2008. “Individual Differences in Non-Verbal Number Acuity Correlate with Maths Achievement.” Nature 455 (7213): 665–668.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

DeRussy, Bernadette M., Madeline A. Aylward, Zhen Fan, Paresh C. Ray, and Ritesh Tandon. 2014. “Inhibition of Cytomegalovirus Infection and Photothermolysis of Infected Cells Using Bioconjugated Gold Nanoparticles.” Scientific Reports 4 (July): 5550.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Yan, Weikai. 2014. Crop Variety Trials. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Lemke, Peter, and Hans-Werner Jacobi, eds. 2012. Arctic Climate Change: The ACSYS Decade and Beyond. Vol. 43. Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences Library. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Thurner, Stefan. 2011. “A Simple General Model of Evolutionary Dynamics.” In Principles of Evolution: From the Planck Epoch to Complex Multicellular Life, edited by Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns and Stefan Thurner, 119–144. The Frontiers Collection. 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 Contemporary African Studies.

Blog post

Davis, Josh. 2016. “Onset Of Spring In The UK Is A Week Earlier Due To Artificial Lights.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/onset-of-spring-in-the-uk-is-a-week-earlier-due-to-artificial-lights/.

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. Tax Systems Modernization: Update on Critical Issues Facing IRS. T-IMTEC-92-18. 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

Tan, Chunli. 2014. “Conceptualizing Psychological History: Edgar Allan Poe and the Themes of the Normal and the Pathological, Life and Death.” Doctoral dissertation, Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois 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

Eldred, Sheila M., and John Eligon. 2016. “Doctor Saw Prince a Day Before His Death.” New York Times, May 11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Macfadden 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Macfadden 2005; Davis and Shearer 2014).

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

Two authors: (Davis and Shearer 2014)
Three authors: (Halberda, Mazzocco, and Feigenson 2008)
4 or more authors: (DeRussy et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Contemporary African Studies
Abbreviation	J. Contemp. Afr. Stud.
ISSN (print)	0258-9001
ISSN (online)	1469-9397
Scope	Development Geography, Planning and Development Political Science and International Relations