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

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

Gewin V. Policy-makers in many areas need input from scientists to help them make sound decisions. Nature. 2003;422(6930):452-453.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ponce de León MS, Zollikofer CP. Neanderthal cranial ontogeny and its implications for late hominid diversity. Nature. 2001;412(6846):534-538.

A journal article with 3 authors

Clutton-Brock TH, Coulson T, Milner JM. Red deer stocks in the Highlands of Scotland. Nature. 2004;429(6989):261-262.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Skumryev V, Stoyanov S, Zhang Y, Hadjipanayis G, Givord D, Nogués J. Beating the superparamagnetic limit with exchange bias. Nature. 2003;423(6942):850-853.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zink M. Scalable Video on Demand. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,.; 2005.

An edited book

Apikyan S, Diamond D, eds. Countering Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism. Springer Netherlands; 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

Motik B. Combining Description Logics, Description Graphs, and Rules. In: Croitoru M, Ferré S, Lukose D, eds. Conceptual Structures: From Information to Intelligence: 18th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2010, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, July 26-30, 2010. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer; 2010:10-12.

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 Sports Medicine.

Blog post

Carpineti A. Samples From Apollo 14 Suggest The Moon Is Almost As Old As The Solar System. 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. College Work-Study Program at the Bay College of Maryland. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1975.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hau CC. Beliefs of Nurse Practitioner Students toward Testicular Cancer and Teaching Testicular Self-Examinations. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 2012.

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. What’s Left Behind. New York Times. August 22, 2010:BR17.

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 ^4–6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Journal of Sports Medicine
Abbreviation	Am. J. Sports Med.
ISSN (print)	0363-5465
ISSN (online)	1552-3365
Scope	Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation