How to format your references using the Language citation style

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

Pinker, Steven. 2011. Decline of violence: Taming the devil within us. Nature 478.309–311.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bundock, Paul.; and Paul Hooykaas. 2005. An Arabidopsis hAT-like transposase is essential for plant development. Nature 436.282–284.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen, Anping.; Shaopeng Wang.; and Stephen W. Pacala. 2012. Comment on “Global correlations in tropical tree species richness and abundance reject neutrality.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 336.1639; author reply 1639.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Naebe, Minoo.; Jing Wang.; Abbas Amini.; Hamid Khayyam.; Nishar Hameed.; Lu Hua Li.; Ying Chen.; and Bronwyn Fox. 2014. Mechanical property and structure of covalent functionalised graphene/epoxy nanocomposites. Scientific reports 4.4375.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Szylar, Christian. 2013. Risk Management under UCITS III/IV. Hoboken, NJ USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Qi, Ershi, Jiang Shen, and Runliang Dou (eds.) 2013. The 19th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management: Assistive Technology of Industrial Engineering. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Yazdanpanah, Ali Pour.; and Karim Faez. 2009. Normalizing Human Ear in Proportion to Size and Rotation. Emerging Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications: 5th International Conference on Intelligent Computing, ICIC 2009, Ulsan, South Korea, September 16-19, 2009. Proceedings, ed. by De-Shuang Huang, Kang-Hyun Jo, Hong-Hee Lee, Hee-Jun Kang, and Vitoantonio Bevilacqua, 37–45. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 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 Language.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2014. UK Announces First Mission To The Moon. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/uk-announces-its-first-mission-moon/.

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. 2016. Commercial Space: FAA Should Examine How to Appropriately Regulate Space Support Vehicles. 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

Leak, Sandra Crawford. 2010. Building community capacity to meet the needs of our aging society: Interdisciplinary competency development for professionals. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina doctoral dissertation.

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

de la MERCED, Michael J. 2017. A Sports Betting App Raises $12 Million. New York Times.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pinker 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Pinker 2011; Bundock and Hooykaas 2005).

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

Two authors: (Bundock and Hooykaas 2005)
Three authors: (Chen, Wang, and Pacala 2012)
4 or more authors: (Naebe et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Language
Abbreviation	Language (Baltim.)
ISSN (print)	0097-8507
ISSN (online)	1535-0665
Scope	Language and Linguistics Linguistics and Language