How to format your references using the Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning. 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

Lawler, A. (2014). In search of Green Arabia. Science (New York, N.Y.), 345(6200), 994–997.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rosen, E. D., & Spiegelman, B. M. (2006). Adipocytes as regulators of energy balance and glucose homeostasis. Nature, 444(7121), 847–853.

A journal article with 3 authors

Murphy, G. E., Leadbetter, J. R., & Jensen, G. J. (2006). In situ structure of the complete Treponema primitia flagellar motor. Nature, 442(7106), 1062–1064.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Skrott, Z., Mistrik, M., Andersen, K. K., Friis, S., Majera, D., Gursky, J., Ozdian, T., Bartkova, J., Turi, Z., Moudry, P., Kraus, M., Michalova, M., Vaclavkova, J., Dzubak, P., Vrobel, I., Pouckova, P., Sedlacek, J., Miklovicova, A., Kutt, A., … Bartek, J. (2017). Alcohol-abuse drug disulfiram targets cancer via p97 segregase adaptor NPL4. Nature, 552(7684), 194–199.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tattar, P. N., Ramaiah, S., & Manjunath, B. G. (2016). A Course in Statistics With R. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Haupt, S. E., Pasini, A., & Marzban, C. (Eds.). (2009). Artificial Intelligence Methods in the Environmental Sciences. Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Naeem, M. A., Bajwa, I. S., & Jamil, N. (2015). A Cache-Based Semi-Stream Join to deal with Unmatched Stream Data. In M. A. Sharaf, M. A. Cheema, & J. Qi (Eds.), Databases Theory and Applications: 26th Australasian Database Conference, ADC 2015, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, June 4-7, 2015. Proceedings (pp. 54–65). 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 Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, May 28). White House Halts US Experiments on the Human Germline. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/white-house-temporarily-stops-united-states-experiments-changing-human-germline/

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). Data Center Consolidation: Agencies Making Progress, but Planned Savings Goals Need to Be Established [Reissued on March 4, 2016] (GAO-16-323). 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

Malekian, A. (2009). Combinatorial problems in online advertising [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

Schwartz, J. (2016, September 28). Counting Green: How to Measure Your Carbon Tire Print. New York Times, D2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lawler, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Lawler, 2014; Rosen & Spiegelman, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Rosen & Spiegelman, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Skrott et al., 2017)

About the journal

Full journal title	Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning
Abbreviation	Open Learn.
ISSN (print)	0268-0513
ISSN (online)	1469-9958
Scope	Education