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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Speakman, J. R. (2010). FTO effect on energy demand versus food intake. Nature, 464(7289), E1; discussion E2.
A journal article with 2 authors
Hu, D. L., & Bush, J. W. M. (2005). Meniscus-climbing insects. Nature, 437(7059), 733–736.
A journal article with 3 authors
Bibby, T. S., Nield, J., & Barber, J. (2001). Iron deficiency induces the formation of an antenna ring around trimeric photosystem I in cyanobacteria. Nature, 412(6848), 743–745.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Zeineh, M. M., Engel, S. A., Thompson, P. M., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2003). Dynamics of the hippocampus during encoding and retrieval of face-name pairs. Science (New York, N.Y.), 299(5606), 577–580.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Adams, D. J., Dyson, P. J., & Tavener, S. J. (2005). Chemistry in Alternative Reaction Media. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Goldak, J. A. (2005). Computational Welding Mechanics. (M. Akhlaghi, Ed.). Boston, MA: Springer US.
A chapter in an edited book
Heun, M. K., Carbajales-Dale, M., & Haney, B. R. (2015). Flows of Direct Energy. In M. Carbajales-Dale & B. R. Haney (Eds.), Beyond GDP: National Accounting in the Age of Resource Depletion (pp. 79–90). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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, E. (2014, June 26). Why one hectare of rainforest grows more tree species than US and Canada combined. 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. (1987). Compensatory Education: Chapter 1 Services Provided to Private Sectarian School Students (No. HRD-87-128BR). 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
Igbojekwe, S. C. (2014). Development of Environmental Friendly Cement for Oil and Gas Well Application (Doctoral dissertation). University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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
Liptak, A. (2017, May 22). Justices Reject 2 Districts In North Carolina, Citing Packing of Black Voters. New York Times, p. A18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Speakman, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Hu & Bush, 2005; Speakman, 2010).

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

  • Two authors: (Hu & Bush, 2005)
  • Three authors: (Bibby, Nield, & Barber, 2001)
  • 6 or more authors: (Zeineh, Engel, Thompson, & Bookheimer, 2003)

About the journal

Full journal titleJournal of the Association for Information Systems
ISSN (print)1536-9323
ScopeComputer Science Applications
Information Systems

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