How to format your references using the South African Journal of Animal Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for South African Journal of Animal Science. 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
McKinnon, W. B. 2012. Planetary science. The strangest terrestrial planet. Science 336, 162–163.
A journal article with 2 authors
Finch, C. E., & Crimmins, E. M. 2004. Inflammatory exposure and historical changes in human life-spans. Science 305, 1736–1739.
A journal article with 3 authors
Weir, A. A. S., Chappell, J., & Kacelnik, A. 2002. Shaping of hooks in New Caledonian crows. Science 297, 981.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Gallopin, T., Fort, P., Eggermann, E., Cauli, B., Luppi, P. H., Rossier, J., Audinat, E., Mühlethaler, M., & Serafin, M. 2000. Identification of sleep-promoting neurons in vitro. Nature 404, 992–995.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Edwards, D. W. 2014. Risk Management in Trading. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Silhavy, R., Senkerik, R., Oplatkova, Z. K., Silhavy, P., & Prokopova, Z. (Eds). 2016. Artificial Intelligence Perspectives in Intelligent Systems: Proceedings of the 5th Computer Science On-line Conference 2016 (CSOC2016), Vol 1. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
A chapter in an edited book
Richichi, A. 2008. Stellar Diameters: Breaking the Barriers.Pages 31–42 in The Power of Optical/IR Interferometry: Recent Scientific Results and 2nd Generation Instrumentation: Proceedings of the ESO Workshop held in Garching, Germany, 4-8 April 2005. Richichi, A., Delplancke, F., Paresce, F., Chelli, A., eds. Eso Astrophysics Symposia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 South African Journal of Animal Science.

Blog post
Carpineti, A. 2017. New Evidence Suggests The Amazon Had A Sea-Like Past. 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. 1975. College Work-Study Program. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
Chung, J. 2015. Quasi-one-dimensional modeling of an adiabatic-compression preheated Ludwieg tube.

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
Yablonsky, L. 2013. Beautiful Ruins. New York Times, M288.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McKinnon, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Finch & Crimmins, 2004; McKinnon, 2012).

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

  • Two authors: (Finch & Crimmins, 2004)
  • Three or more authors: (Gallopin et al., 2000)

About the journal

Full journal titleSouth African Journal of Animal Science
AbbreviationS. Afr. J. Anim. Sci.
ISSN (print)0375-1589
ISSN (online)2221-4062
ScopeAnimal Science and Zoology

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