How to format your references using the Journal of Finance citation style

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

Mishra, Jyoti, 2014, Having it all, Science (New York, N.Y.) 345, 1090.

A journal article with 2 authors

Eberl, Gérard, and Dan R. Littman, 2004, Thymic origin of intestinal alphabeta T cells revealed by fate mapping of RORgammat+ cells, Science (New York, N.Y.) 305, 248–251.

A journal article with 3 authors

Nowak, M. A., N. L. Komarova, and P. Niyogi, 2001, Evolution of universal grammar, Science (New York, N.Y.) 291, 114–118.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Chelton, Dudley B., Michael G. Schlax, Michael H. Freilich, and Ralph F. Milliff, 2004, Satellite measurements reveal persistent small-scale features in ocean winds, Science (New York, N.Y.) 303, 978–983.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Yalaoui, Alice, Hicham Chehade, Farouk Yalaoui, and Lionel Amodeo, 2012, Optimization of Logistics (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ).

An edited book

Ali, Syed Z., 2007, Breast Cytopathology. Ed. Anil V. Parwani. Vol. 4. Essentials in Cytopathology (Springer, New York, NY).

A chapter in an edited book

Kryszkiewicz, Marzena, and Piotr Lasek, 2008, FUN: Fast Discovery of Minimal Sets of Attributes Functionally Determining a Decision Attribute, in James F. Peters, in Andrzej Skowron, and in Henryk Rybiński ed.: Transactions on Rough Sets IX. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg).

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 Finance.

Blog post

Taub, Ben, 2016, Here’s Why The Texture Of Some Food Grosses Us Out, IFLScience (IFLScience).

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, 1997, Federal Ships: Policy Changes in the Disposal of Surplus Ships, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Lefebvre, Karlea, 2017, Racial Prejudice, Individualism, and Political Identity: Understanding the Forty-Year Trend of Anti-Welfare Spending Preferences, (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL).

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

Wagner, James, 2017, Harvey, Walker and Lagares Join the Mets’ Lengthy Injured List, New York Times.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Finance
Abbreviation	J. Finance
ISSN (print)	0022-1082
ISSN (online)	1540-6261
Scope	Accounting Economics and Econometrics Finance