How to format your references using the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. 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

Padma, T. V. 2005. Rivalry and red tape. Nature 436(7050):490–491.

A journal article with 2 authors

Attisano, L., and J. L. Wrana. 2002. Signal transduction by the TGF-beta superfamily. Science (New York, N.Y.) 296(5573):1646–1647.

A journal article with 3 authors

Erol, V., F. Ozaydin, and A. A. Altintas. 2014. Analysis of entanglement measures and LOCC maximized quantum Fisher information of general two qubit systems. Scientific reports 4:5422.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Warren, S. C., L. C. Messina, L. S. Slaughter, M. Kamperman, Q. Zhou, S. M. Gruner, F. J. DiSalvo, and U. Wiesner. 2008. Ordered mesoporous materials from metal nanoparticle-block copolymer self-assembly. Science (New York, N.Y.) 320(5884):1748–1752.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hitchner, J. R. 2017. Financial Valuation. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Kő, A., and E. Francesconi, editors. 2015. Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective: 4th International Conference, EGOVIS 2015, Valencia, Spain, September 1-3, 2015, Proceedings1st ed. 2015. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Yusnita, M. A., M. P. Paulraj, S. Yaacob, A. B. Shahriman, R. Yusuf, and S. Nordin. 2016. On the Use of Spectral Feature Fusions for Enhanced Performance of Malaysian English Accents Classification. Pages 35–45 in N. A. Yacob, M. Mohamed, and M. A. K. Megat Hanafiah, editors. Regional Conference on Science, Technology and Social Sciences (RCSTSS 2014): Science and Technology. Springer, Singapore.

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 Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014, April 9. The Pressure’s On To Save Our Rarest Primate. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/pressures-save-our-rarest-primate/.

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. 1986. ADP Acquisitions: SSA Should Limit ADP Procurements Until Further Testing Is Performed. U.S. Government Printing Office, IMTEC-86-31, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Turner, L. B. 2012. Diet, physical activity and breast cancer risk: An integrative science cross-populational approach. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Wagner, J. 2017, May 16. Mets Hope a Little Rest Will Suffice for Cabrera. New York Times:B9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Padma 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Attisano and Wrana 2002; Padma 2005).

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

Two authors: (Attisano and Wrana 2002)
Three or more authors: (Warren et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transactions of the American Fisheries Society
Abbreviation	Trans. Am. Fish. Soc.
ISSN (print)	0002-8487
ISSN (online)	1548-8659
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics