How to format your references using the Journal of the Association for Information Systems citation style

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

Tso, T. C. (2004). Agriculture of the future. Nature, 428(6979), 215–217.

A journal article with 2 authors

Brinker, C. J., & Clem, P. G. (2013). Materials science. Quartz on silicon. Science (New York, N.Y.), 340(6134), 818–819.

A journal article with 3 authors

Westfall, P. J., Ballon, D. R., & Thorner, J. (2004). When the stress of your environment makes you go HOG wild. Science (New York, N.Y.), 306(5701), 1511–1512.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Schirmer, E. C., Florens, L., Guan, T., Yates, J. R., 3rd, & Gerace, L. (2003). Nuclear membrane proteins with potential disease links found by subtractive proteomics. Science (New York, N.Y.), 301(5638), 1380–1382.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tagare, D. M. (2011). Electric Power Generation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Gritzalis, D., & Lopez, J. (Eds.). (2009). Emerging Challenges for Security, Privacy and Trust: 24th IFIP TC 11 International Information Security Conference, SEC 2009, Pafos, Cyprus, May 18–20, 2009. Proceedings (Vol. 297). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bowker, G. C., Baker, K., Millerand, F., & Ribes, D. (2010). Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & M. Allen (Eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research (pp. 97–117). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 the Association for Information Systems.

Blog post

Andrew, D. (2017, January 11). It’s Time To Wake Up To The Devastating Impact Flying Has On The Environment. 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. (2010). K-12 Education: Many Challenges Arise in Educating Students Who Change Schools Frequently (No. GAO-11-40). 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

Ballard, K. J. (2012). Frequent factors for psychiatric hospital readmission (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Poniewozik, J. (2017, July 23). Close Encounters of the Human Kind. New York Times, p. C6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Tso, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Brinker & Clem, 2013; Tso, 2004).

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

Two authors: (Brinker & Clem, 2013)
Three authors: (Westfall, Ballon, & Thorner, 2004)
6 or more authors: (Schirmer, Florens, Guan, Yates, & Gerace, 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of the Association for Information Systems
ISSN (print)	1536-9323
Scope	Computer Science Applications Information Systems