How to format your references using the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics citation style

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

Olby, Robert. 2003. “Quiet Debut for the Double Helix.” Nature 421 (6921): 402–405.

A journal article with 2 authors

Belloc, Eulàlia, and Raúl Méndez. 2008. “A Deadenylation Negative Feedback Mechanism Governs Meiotic Metaphase Arrest.” Nature 452 (7190): 1017–1021.

A journal article with 3 authors

Naylor, R. L., S. L. Williams, and D. R. Strong. 2001. “Ecology. Aquaculture--a Gateway for Exotic Species.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 294 (5547): 1655–1656.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Crawley, M. J., S. L. Brown, R. S. Hails, D. D. Kohn, and M. Rees. 2001. “Transgenic Crops in Natural Habitats.” Nature 409 (6821): 682–683.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Staudt, Günter. 2001. Experimentalphysik. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Kapetanios, Epaminondas, Vijayan Sugumaran, and Myra Spiliopoulou, eds. 2008. Natural Language and Information Systems: 13th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2008 London, UK, June 24-27, 2008 Proceedings. Vol. 5039. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Melián-Batista, Belén, J. Marcos Moreno-Vega, Nitesh Vaswani, and Rayco Yumar. 2009. “A Nature Inspired Approach for the Uncapacitated Plant Cycle Location Problem.” In Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO 2008), edited by Natalio Krasnogor, María Belén Melián-Batista, José Andrés Moreno Pérez, J. Marcos Moreno-Vega, and David Alejandro Pelta, 49–60. Studies in Computational Intelligence. 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 Graphic Novels and Comics.

Blog post

Hale, Tom. 2017. “Omsin, The Coin-Chomping Turtle, Has Died Just Weeks After Surgery.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/omsin-the-coinchomping-turtle-has-died-just-weeks-after-surgery/.

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. FAA Budget: Key Issues Need to Be Addressed. T-RCED-92-51. 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

Gambini, Fiorella. 2011. “Leadership Capacity for Succession and Sustainability in a Family-Owned Private School.” Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine 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

Wagner, James. 2016. “Once Damaged Goods, Mets Reliever Returns to the Top Shelf.” New York Times, October 5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Olby 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Olby 2003; Belloc and Méndez 2008).

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

Two authors: (Belloc and Méndez 2008)
Three authors: (Naylor, Williams, and Strong 2001)
4 or more authors: (Crawley et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
ISSN (print)	2150-4857
ISSN (online)	2150-4865
Scope	Literature and Literary Theory Visual Arts and Performing Arts