How to format your references using the The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Humphries, Courtney. 2014. Sex differences: Luck of the chromosomes. Nature 516: S10-1.
A journal article with 2 authors
Churchman, L. Stirling, and Jonathan S. Weissman. 2011. Nascent transcript sequencing visualizes transcription at nucleotide resolution. Nature 469: 368–373.
A journal article with 3 authors
Gitlin, Leonid, Sveta Karelsky, and Raul Andino. 2002. Short interfering RNA confers intracellular antiviral immunity in human cells. Nature 418: 430–434.
A journal article with 11 or more authors
Meylan, Etienne, Joseph Curran, Kay Hofmann, Darius Moradpour, Marco Binder, Ralf Bartenschlager, and Jürg Tschopp. 2005. Cardif is an adaptor protein in the RIG-I antiviral pathway and is targeted by hepatitis C virus. Nature 437: 1167–1172.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Saunders, Anthony, and Linda Allen. 2010. Credit Risk Management in and Out of the Financial Crisis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Solomin, Leonid, ed. 2012. The Basic Principles of External Skeletal Fixation Using the Ilizarov and Other Devices. 2nd ed. 2012. Milano: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Slaughter, David C. 2014. The Biological Engineer: Sensing the Difference Between Crops and Weeds. In Automation: The Future of Weed Control in Cropping Systems, ed. Stephen L. Young and Francis J. Pierce, 71–95. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

Blog post
O`Callaghan, Jonathan. 2016. NASA Will Be Making An Announcement Today - Here’s How To Watch Live. IFLScience. IFLScience. May 10.

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. Compensatory Education: Aguilar v. Felton Decision’s Continuing Impact on Chapter 1 Program. HRD-89-131BR. 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
Mukherjee, Niloy. 2003. Development of High Sensitivity Bending Mode Polymer Piezoelectric Devices for Inner Ear Implantation. Doctoral dissertation, Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati.

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, David A. 2007. Fast Cellphones Aim To Unseat Laptops. New York Times, April 16.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Humphries 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Churchman and Weissman 2011; Humphries 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Churchman and Weissman 2011)
  • Three or more authors: (Meylan et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleThe Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
ISSN (print)1383-4924
ISSN (online)1572-8552
ScopeArts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Linguistics and Language

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