How to format your references using the Visual Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Visual Studies. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Urnov, Fyodor D. 2014. “Biological Techniques: Edit the Genome to Understand It.” Nature 513 (7516): 40–41.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mackenzie, A. P., and S. A. Grigera. 2005. “Physics. A Quantum Critical Route to Field-Induced Superconductivity.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 309 (5739): 1330–1331.

A journal article with 3 authors

Parker, Heidi G., Leonid Kruglyak, and Elaine A. Ostrander. 2006. “Molecular Genetics: DNA Analysis of a Putative Dog Clone.” Nature 440 (7081): E1-2.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Zhou, Yan, Kai Sun, Yi Ma, Haozheng Yang, Yuanliang Zhang, Xianming Kong, and Lixin Wei. 2014. “Autophagy Inhibits Chemotherapy-Induced Apoptosis through Downregulating Bad and Bim in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cells.” Scientific Reports 4 (June): 5382.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Krasner, David. 2011. A History of Modern Drama. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Curran, Richard, Shuo-Yan Chou, and Amy Trappey, eds. 2008. Collaborative Product and Service Life Cycle Management for a Sustainable World: Proceedings of the 15th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (CE2008). Advanced Concurrent Engineering. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Becher, Thomas, Alessandro Broggio, and Andrea Ferroglia. 2015. “Resummation by RG Evolution.” In Introduction to Soft-Collinear Effective Theory, edited by Alessandro Broggio and Andrea Ferroglia, 57–63. Lecture Notes in Physics. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Visual Studies.

Blog post

Andrews, Robin. 2016. “Crop Breeding Cannot Keep Up With Climate Change.” IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/crop-breeding-cannot-keep-up-with-climate-change/.

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. 2005. Transportation Services: Better Dissemination and Oversight of DOT’s Guidance Could Lead to Improved Access for Limited English-Proficient Populations (Spanish Version). GAO-06-185. 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

Watson, Kevin F. 2014. “Persons and How We Trace Them: What Johnston Got Wrong.” Doctoral dissertation, 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

Greenhouse, Linda. 2006. “COURT TO WEIGH RACE AS A FACTOR IN SCHOOL ROLLS.” New York Times, June 6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Urnov 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Urnov 2014; Mackenzie and Grigera 2005).

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

Two authors: (Mackenzie and Grigera 2005)
Three authors: (Parker, Kruglyak, and Ostrander 2006)
4 or more authors: (Zhou et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Visual Studies
Abbreviation	Vis. Stud.
ISSN (print)	1472-586X
ISSN (online)	1472-5878
Scope	Visual Arts and Performing Arts Anthropology Cultural Studies