How to format your references using the The Astronomical Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Astronomical Journal. 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

Schiebinger, L. 2014, Nature, 507, 9

A journal article with 2 authors

Rubio, V., & Deng, X. W. 2007, Science, 318, 206

A journal article with 3 authors

Martill, D. M., Tischlinger, H., & Longrich, N. R. 2015, Science, 349, 416

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Mullighan, C. G., Zhang, J., Kasper, L. H., et al. 2011, Nature, 471, 235

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kudnig, S. T., & Séguin, B. 2012, Veterinary Surgical Oncology (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,.)

An edited book

Hoffmann Nunes, R., Abello, A. L., & Castillo, M. 2016, Critical Findings in Neuroradiology (Cham: Springer International Publishing)

A chapter in an edited book

Granick, S. 2010, in Advanced Tribology: Proceedings of CIST2008 & ITS-IFToMM2008, ed. J. Luo, Y. Meng, T. Shao, & Q. Zhao (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), 11

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 Astronomical Journal.

Blog post

Taub, B. 2016, IFLScience (IFLScience), https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/beer-helps-console-snails-before-being-executed-science/

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. 2000, Information Technology Management: SBA Needs to Establish Policies and Procedures for Key IT Processes (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

Brown, C. P. 2010, Range vs. register: An important distinction in choral repertoire for the adolescent male (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona)

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

Kelly, C. 2013, New York Times, A27B

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schiebinger 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Rubio & Deng 2007; Schiebinger 2014).

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

Two authors: (Rubio & Deng 2007)
Three or more authors: (Mullighan et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Astronomical Journal
Abbreviation	Astron. J.
ISSN (print)	0004-6256
ISSN (online)	1538-3881
Scope	Space and Planetary Science Astronomy and Astrophysics