How to format your references using the African Journal of Marine Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for African Journal of Marine Science (AJMS). 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Belnap J 2013. Microbiology. Some like it hot, some not. Science (New York, N.Y.) 340: 1533–1534.

A journal article with 2 authors

Nakatani H, Yamaguchi Y 2014. Quick concurrent responses to global and local cognitive information underlie intuitive understanding in board-game experts. Scientific reports 4: 5894.

A journal article with 3 authors

Faehnle CR, Walleshauser J, Joshua-Tor L 2014. Mechanism of Dis3l2 substrate recognition in the Lin28-let-7 pathway. Nature 514: 252–256.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Wartewig T, Kurgyis Z, Keppler S, Pechloff K, Hameister E, Öllinger R, Maresch R, Buch T, Steiger K, Winter C, et al. 2017. PD-1 is a haploinsufficient suppressor of T cell lymphomagenesis. Nature 552: 121–125.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Waye JD, Aisenberg J, Rubin PH 2013. Practical Colonoscopy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

An edited book

Seiler F, Igra O (eds) 2016. Hypervelocity Launchers (1st ed. 2016 edn). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Cregan PB 2008. The Soybean Molecular Genetic Linkage Map. In: Stacey G (ed.), Genetics and Genomics of Soybean. New York, NY: Springer. pp 79–89.

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 African Journal of Marine Science.

Blog post

Fang J 2014. The Sun Emitted Two X-Class Solar Flares Back-to-Back. Accessed from https://www.iflscience.com/space/sun-emitted-two-x-class-solar-flares-back-back/, 2018-10-30.

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 1979. Improvements Recommended for Better Oversight of the Capitol Page School. GGD-79-56. 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

Bornheimer ME 2010. The influence of leadership development programs on the community college leadership shortage: A case study. 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

Burghardt LF 2006 (19 August). An Animal Sanctuary Is Under Pressure to Move. New York Times, LI10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Belnap 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Belnap 2013, Nakatani and Yamaguchi 2014).

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

Two authors: (Nakatani and Yamaguchi 2014)
Three or more authors: (Wartewig et al. 2017)

About the journal

Full journal title	African Journal of Marine Science
ISSN (print)	1814-232X
ISSN (online)	1814-2338
Scope