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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP). 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

Chipman A: Swiss on a roll. Nature 2007; 448:525

A journal article with 2 authors

Vasseur DA, Fox JW: Phase-locking and environmental fluctuations generate synchrony in a predator-prey community. Nature 2009; 460:1007–1010

A journal article with 3 authors

Miller PM, Gavrilets S, Rice WR: Sexual conflict via maternal-effect genes in ZW species. Science 2006; 312:73

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Yao Q, Luo Z, Yuan X, et al.: Assembly of nanoions via electrostatic interactions: ion-like behavior of charged noble metal nanoclusters. Sci Rep 2014; 4:3848

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chen G, Wang X, Li X: Fundamentals of Complex Networks. Singapore, John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd, 2014

An edited book

Murray N, Scarino A, editors: Dynamic Ecologies: A Relational Perspective on Languages Education in the Asia-Pacific Region. Dordrecht, Springer Netherlands, 2014

A chapter in an edited book

Munn LL, Kunert C, Tyrrell JA: Modeling Tumor Blood Vessel Dynamics, inLedzewicz U, Schättler H, Friedman A, et al., editorsMathematical Methods and Models in Biomedicine. New York, NY, Springer, 2013, pp 117–147.

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 Psychiatry.

Blog post

Hamilton K: 4 Behaviors Are The Most Reliable Predictors Of Divorce [Internet]. IFLScience 2017; [cited 2018 Oct 30] Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/4-behaviors-are-the-most-reliable-predictors-of-divorce/

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: Aviation Safety: FAA Oversight of Aviation Repair Stations. Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Avila B: Comparison of paternal and maternal involvement in a government funded home-based intervention program: A multivariate analysis of parent gender, child gender and age of the child2013;

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

Friedman L, Schwartz J: Warm Gulf Fuels the Rain and Gives It Nowhere to Go. New York Times 2017; A13

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 Psychiatry
Abbreviation	Am. J. Psychiatry
ISSN (print)	0002-953X
ISSN (online)	1535-7228
Scope	Psychiatry and Mental health