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

McGill, B. J. 2010. Ecology. Matters of scale. Science (New York, N.Y.) 328(5978):575–576.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gottifredi, V., and C. Prives. 2001. Molecular biology. Getting p53 out of the nucleus. Science (New York, N.Y.) 292(5523):1851–1852.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hiraga, T., I. M. Anderson, and D. L. Kohlstedt. 2004. Grain boundaries as reservoirs of incompatible elements in the Earth’s mantle. Nature 427(6976):699–703.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Tang, J. A., S. Dugar, G. Zhong, N. S. Dalal, J. P. Zheng, Y. Yang, and R. Fu. 2013. Non-destructive monitoring of charge-discharge cycles on lithium ion batteries using ⁷Li stray-field imaging. Scientific reports 3:2596.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Verma, J. P. 2016. Sports Research with Analytical Solution Using SPSS®. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Zhou, M., editor. 2011. Advances in Education and Management: International Symposium, ISAEBD 2011, Dalian, China, August 6-7, 2011, Proceedings, Part IV. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Wylie, K. R. 2007. Sexuality. Pages 43–50 in J. Cockburn and M. E. Pawson, editors. Psychological Challenges in Obstetrics and Gynecology: The Clinical Management. Springer, London.

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, D. 2017, January 26. Five Things Nurses Are Really Good At – And Sometimes Better Than Doctors. 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. 1994. Electronic Signature Prototype System. U.S. Government Printing Office, AIMD-94-70R, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Robinson, E. A. 2012. Exploring the Barriers to Online-Business Profitability for Small Business. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University, Scottsdale, AZ.

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

Kercher, S. 2015, August 16. From Metaphysical to Mainstream. New York Times:ST10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McGill 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Gottifredi and Prives 2001; McGill 2010).

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

Two authors: (Gottifredi and Prives 2001)
Three or more authors: (Tang et al. 2013)

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