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

Sheffield, C. 2000, Nature, 404, 549

A journal article with 2 authors

Calka, A., & Wexler, D. 2002, Nature, 419, 147

A journal article with 3 authors

Kennedy, S., Wang, D., & Ruvkun, G. 2004, Nature, 427, 645

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Ni, K.-K., Ospelkaus, S., de Miranda, M. H. G., et al. 2008, Science, 322, 231

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hanzo, L., & Keller, T. 2006, OFDM and MC-CDMA (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

Mozaffari, M. S. 2013, New Strategies to Advance Pre/Diabetes Care: Integrative Approach by PPPM, Vol. 3 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands)

A chapter in an edited book

Woolley, J. L. 2014, in Emerging Research Directions in Social Entrepreneurship, ed. L. Pate, & C. Wankel (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), 51

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

Carpineti, A. 2015, IFLScience (IFLScience), https://www.iflscience.com/technology/non-toxic-flame-retardant-developed-using-mussels/

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. 1989, GAO’s Views on SDIO’s Phase I Cost Estimate (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

Kim, S. B. 2010, Model uncertainty and model averaging in the estimation of benchmark dose (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

Kishkovsky, S. 2007, New York Times, A6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sheffield 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Calka & Wexler 2002; Sheffield 2000).

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

Two authors: (Calka & Wexler 2002)
Three or more authors: (Ni et al. 2008)

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

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