How to format your references using the The American Sociologist citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Sociologist. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Eisenstein, M. (2015). Super-resolve me: from micro to nano. Nature, 526(7573), 459–462.

A journal article with 2 authors

Miles, L., & Kapos, V. (2008). Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation: global land-use implications. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5882), 1454–1455.

A journal article with 3 authors

Du, M., Wang, Z., & Hu, H. (2013). Measuring memory with the order of fractional derivative. Scientific reports, 3, 3431.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Wiederhecker, G. S., Chen, L., Gondarenko, A., & Lipson, M. (2009). Controlling photonic structures using optical forces. Nature, 462(7273), 633–636.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ratzliff, A., Unutzer, J., Katon, W., & Stephens, K. A. (2015). Integrated Care. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Milkov, N., & Peckhaus, V. (Eds.). (2013). The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism (Vol. 273). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Pöschl, C., & Scherzer, O. (2015). Distance Measures and Applications to Multimodal Variational Imaging. In O. Scherzer (Ed.), Handbook of Mathematical Methods in Imaging (pp. 125–155). New York, NY: Springer.

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 Sociologist.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015, November 5). Eel-Like Amphibian 278 Million Years Old With Fangs Found In Brazil. IFLScience. IFLScience. Accessed 30 October 2018

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. (2013). Use of Remanufactured Parts in the Federal Vehicle Fleet Is Based On a Variety of Factors (No. GAO-13-316R). 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

Parker, E. C. (2010). Perceptions of youth with diabetes and their parents/guardians about youth eating habits and nutrition-related difficulties (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Steel, E., & de la MERCED, M. J. (2017, July 27). Discovery Closes In on Acquiring Scripps Networks as Viacom Exits Competition. New York Times, p. B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Eisenstein 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Eisenstein 2015; Miles and Kapos 2008).

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

Two authors: (Miles and Kapos 2008)
Three or more authors: (Wiederhecker et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Sociologist
Abbreviation	Am. Sociol.
ISSN (print)	0003-1232
ISSN (online)	1936-4784
Scope	Social Sciences (miscellaneous) Sociology and Political Science