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

Pockley, P. (2000), “Clean-up strategy at Australian nuclear site called into question,” Nature, 404, 797.

A journal article with 2 authors

Campbell, E., and Salathé, M. (2013), “Complex social contagion makes networks more vulnerable to disease outbreaks,” Scientific reports, 3, 1905.

A journal article with 3 authors

Melendez, I., Grice, K., and Schwark, L. (2013), “Exceptional preservation of Palaeozoic steroids in a diagenetic continuum,” Scientific reports, 3, 2768.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Milliron, D. J., Hughes, S. M., Cui, Y., Manna, L., Li, J., Wang, L.-W., and Alivisatos, A. P. (2004), “Colloidal nanocrystal heterostructures with linear and branched topology,” Nature, 430, 190–195.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kölle, W. (2009), Wasseranalysen - richtig beurteilt, Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Tom, W. L. (ed.) (2014), Severe Skin Diseases in Children: Beyond Topical Therapy, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Parker, A., Simari, G. I., Sliva, A., and Subrahmanian, V. S. (2014), “Experimental Evaluation,” in Data-driven Generation of Policies, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science, eds. G. I. Simari, A. Sliva, and V. S. Subrahmanian, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 37–45.

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

Hamilton, K. (2016), “Global Warming To Expose More People To Zika-Spreading Mosquito Aedes Aegypti,” IFLScience, 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 (1978), Concurrent Development and Production of MK-12A Reentry Vehicle, 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

Gonzalez, E. R. (2015), “Technology and adiposity: Effects of television time, video or computer game time, and computer use on body fat among Latino youth,” 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

Feeney, K. (2007), “Cross-Cultural Confections,” New York Times, NJ6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pockley 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Campbell and Salathé 2013; Pockley 2000).

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

Two authors: (Campbell and Salathé 2013)
Three or more authors: (Milliron et al. 2004)

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