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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The American Statistician (TAS). 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

Markham, J. (2014), “Rare species occupy uncommon niches,” Scientific reports, 4, 6012.

A journal article with 2 authors

Zhu, M., and Ahlberg, P. E. (2004), “The origin of the internal nostril of tetrapods,” Nature, 432, 94–97.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ivany, L. C., Patterson, W. P., and Lohmann, K. C. (2000), “Cooler winters as a possible cause of mass extinctions at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary,” Nature, 407, 887–890.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Michel, P., Benz, W., Tanga, P., and Richardson, D. C. (2001), “Collisions and gravitational reaccumulation: forming asteroid families and satellites,” Science (New York, N.Y.), 294, 1696–1700.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stein, R. L. (2011), Kinetics of Enzyme Action, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Herrero, Á., Snášel, V., Abraham, A., Zelinka, I., Baruque, B., Quintián, H., Calvo, J. L., Sedano, J., and Corchado, E. (eds.) (2013), International Joint Conference CISIS’12-ICEUTE´12-SOCO´12 Special Sessions, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bel Enguix, G., and Nagy, B. (2014), “Modeling Syntactic Complexity with P Systems: A Preview,” in Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation: 13th International Conference, UCNC 2014, London, ON, Canada, July 14-18, 2014, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, eds. O. H. Ibarra, L. Kari, and S. Kopecki, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 54–66.

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 Statistician.

Blog post

Luntz, S. (2014), “Infographic Shows The Differences Between The Diseases We Donate To, And The Diseases That Kill Us,” IFLScience, IFLScience, Available athttps://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/infographic-shows-differences-between-diseases-we-donate-and-diseases-kill-us/.

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 (1990), Energy R&D: DOE’s Allocation of Funds for Basic and Applied Research and Development, 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

Schmidt, M. P. (2013), “Being here,” Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Baker, A. L. (2014), “Push to Rid City of Classrooms That Are Anything but Temporary,” New York Times, A18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Markham 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Markham 2014; Zhu and Ahlberg 2004).

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

Two authors: (Zhu and Ahlberg 2004)
Three or more authors: (Michel et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	The American Statistician
Abbreviation	Am. Stat.
ISSN (print)	0003-1305
ISSN (online)	1537-2731
Scope	Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty General Mathematics Statistics and Probability