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

Good, M. F. (2013), “Immunology. Pasteur approach to a malaria vaccine may take the lead,” Science (New York, N.Y.), 341, 1352–1353.

A journal article with 2 authors

Flames, N., and Hobert, O. (2009), “Gene regulatory logic of dopamine neuron differentiation,” Nature, 458, 885–889.

A journal article with 3 authors

Broza, Y. Y., Zuri, L., and Haick, H. (2014), “Combined volatolomics for monitoring of human body chemistry,” Scientific reports, 4, 4611.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Pan, C.-T., Hinks, J. A., Ramasse, Q. M., Greaves, G., Bangert, U., Donnelly, S. E., and Haigh, S. J. (2014), “In-situ observation and atomic resolution imaging of the ion irradiation induced amorphisation of graphene,” Scientific reports, 4, 6334.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zhang, W., Chou, X., Shi, T., Ma, Z., Bao, H., Chen, J., Chen, L., Li, D., and Xue, C. (2016), Measurement Technology for Micro-Nanometer Devices, Singapore: John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd.

An edited book

Tangpricha, V. (ed.) (2016), Vitamin D: A Clinical Casebook, Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Fardoun, H. M., Alghazzawi, D. M., López, S. R., Penichet, V. M. R., and Gallud, J. A. (2012), “Online Social Networks Impact in Secondary Education,” in International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning, Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, eds. P. Vittorini, R. Gennari, I. Marenzi, F. de la Prieta, and J. M. C. Rodríguez, Berlin, Heidelberg: 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

Andrew, E. (2015), “Antimicrobial Material Could Help 3D-Printed Body Parts Resist Infection,” 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 (1996), Managed Care Initiatives, 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

Odom, S. A. (2017), “Electronic health records: Overcoming obstacles to improve acceptance and utilization for mental health clinicians,” Doctoral dissertation, Minneapolis, MN: Capella University.

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

Rothenberg, B. (2017), “Australian Persists in Chase for Elusive Title,” New York Times, SP2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Good 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Flames and Hobert 2009; Good 2013).

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

Two authors: (Flames and Hobert 2009)
Three or more authors: (Pan et al. 2014)

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

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