How to format your references using the Journal of Information Literacy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Information Literacy (JIL). 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

Schilling, G. (2000). Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A hundred million points of light. Nature, 407(6804), 557.

A journal article with 2 authors

Schultz, P. G., & Lerner, R. A. (2002). Completing the circle. Nature, 418(6897), 485.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rust, M. J., Golden, S. S., & O’Shea, E. K. (2011). Light-driven changes in energy metabolism directly entrain the cyanobacterial circadian oscillator. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331(6014), 220–223.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Dai, P., Mook, H. A., Aeppli, G., Hayden, S. M., & Dogan, F. (2000). Resonance as a measure of pairing correlations in the high-Tc superconductor YBa2Cu3O6.6. Nature, 406(6799), 965–968.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Schaik, C. P. V. (2015). The Primate Origins of Human Nature. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Tsao, J. W. (Ed.). (2012). Traumatic Brain Injury: A Clinician’s Guide to Diagnosis, Management, and Rehabilitation. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Morschett, D., Schramm-Klein, H., & Zentes, J. (2009). Motives for Internationalisation. In H. Schramm-Klein & J. Zentes (Eds.), Strategic International Management: Text and Cases (pp. 71–91). Gabler.

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 Information Literacy.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, February 20). Eye Tracking Is The Next Frontier Of Human-Computer Interaction. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/eye-tracking-next-frontier-human-computer-interaction/

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. (1991). Earth Observing System: Information on NASA’s Selection of Data Centers (IMTEC-91-67). 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

Bourgault, R. R. (2008). Multi-scale pedologic investigation of manganiferous soils in the Maryland Piedmont [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Mueller, B. (2017, September 21). Black Detectives in New York Say Cronyism Cost Promotions. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schilling, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Schilling, 2000; Schultz & Lerner, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Schultz & Lerner, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Dai et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Information Literacy
ISSN (online)	1750-5968
Scope