How to format your references using the The American Journal of Human Genetics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Journal of Human Genetics. 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
1. Smaglik, P. (2005). Guiding hands. Nature 434, 801.
A journal article with 2 authors
1. Rieseberg, L.H., and Willis, J.H. (2007). Plant speciation. Science 317, 910–914.
A journal article with 3 authors
1. Pascalis, O., de Haan, M., and Nelson, C.A. (2002). Is face processing species-specific during the first year of life? Science 296, 1321–1323.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
1. Wang, D., Bushnell, D.A., Huang, X., Westover, K.D., Levitt, M., and Kornberg, R.D. (2009). Structural basis of transcription: backtracked RNA polymerase II at 3.4 angstrom resolution. Science 324, 1203–1206.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1. Gupta, S.K. (2010). Modern Hydrology and Sustainable Water Development (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).
An edited book
1. (2014). Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation: 12th International Conference, AISC 2014, Seville, Spain, December 11-13, 2014. Proceedings (Cham: Springer International Publishing).
A chapter in an edited book
1. Anderson, I.M., and Arnone, D. (2009). Medications. In Handbook of Depression, I.M. Anderson, ed. (Tarporley: Springer Healthcare Ltd.), pp. 45–58.

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 Human Genetics.

Blog post
1. Andrew, D. (2016). Why Can’t We Remember Our Early Childhood? (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
1. Government Accountability Office (2011). Commercial Space Transportation: Industry Trends and Key Issues Affecting Federal Oversight and International Competitiveness (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
1. Schwartz, K.A. (2010). Dynamics of Teacher Self-Efficacy: Middle School Reading and Language Arts Teacher Responses on a Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale. Doctoral dissertation. University of South Florida.

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
1. Kenigsberg, B. (2016). Review: ‘Dying to Know’ How to Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out. New York Times C9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference 2.
This sentence cites two references 2,4.
This sentence cites four references 2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal titleThe American Journal of Human Genetics
AbbreviationAm. J. Hum. Genet.
ISSN (print)0002-9297
ISSN (online)1537-6605
ScopeGenetics
Genetics(clinical)

Other styles