How to format your references using the The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 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	Download the output style file
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

Seife C. MATERIALS SCIENCE: Long-Wavelength Lasers Sniff Out New Uses. Science 2000;290:916–7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Georgianna DR, Mayfield SP. Exploiting diversity and synthetic biology for the production of algal biofuels. Nature 2012;488:329–35.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dawkins MS, Donnelly CA, Jones TA. Chicken welfare is influenced more by housing conditions than by stocking density. Nature 2004;427:342–4.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Guet CC, Elowitz MB, Hsing W, Leibler S. Combinatorial synthesis of genetic networks. Science 2002;296:1466–70.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wassenaar TM. Bacteria. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

Bertelsen OW, Ciolfi L, Grasso MA, Papadopoulos GA, editors. ECSCW 2013: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21-25 September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus. London: Springer; 2013. XIV, 300 p p.

A chapter in an edited book

Wagner RD. Effects of Microbiota on GI Health: Gnotobiotic Research. In: Huffnagle GB, Noverr MC, editors. GI Microbiota and Regulation of the Immune System. New York, NY: Springer; 2008. p. 41–56.

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 The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Blog post

Fang J. How Female Parasitoid Wasps Pick Their Caterpillar Victims [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-female-parasitoid-wasps-pick-their-caterpillar-victims/

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. Information Technology: Agencies Need to Establish Comprehensive Policies to Address Changes to Projects’ Cost, Schedule, and Performance Goals. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2008 Jul. Report No.: GAO-08-925.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

MacKinder M. Max the Knife, Salesman [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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

Murphy MJO. Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of The New York Times. New York Times. 2015;C31.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (1).
This sentence cites two references (1,2).
This sentence cites four references (1–4).

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Abbreviation	Am. J. Clin. Nutr.
ISSN (print)	0002-9165
ISSN (online)	1938-3207
Scope	Medicine (miscellaneous) Nutrition and Dietetics