How to format your references using the Contemporary Arab Affairs citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Contemporary Arab Affairs. 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 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

Bowen, Gabriel J. 2011. “Ocean Science. A Faster Water Cycle.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 332 (6028): 430–431.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yang, Wei Yuan, and Martin Gruebele. 2003. “Folding at the Speed Limit.” Nature 423 (6936): 193–197.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aspinwall, Lisa G., Teneille R. Brown, and James Tabery. 2012. “The Double-Edged Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges’ Sentencing of Psychopaths?” Science (New York, N.Y.) 337 (6096): 846–849.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Chen, Qun, Chengzhen Wei, Yizhou Zhang, Huan Pang, Qingyi Lu, and Feng Gao. 2014. “Single-Crystalline Hyperbranched Nanostructure of Iron Hydroxyl Phosphate Fe5(PO4)4(OH)3·2H2O for Highly Selective Capture of Phosphopeptides.” Scientific Reports 4 (January 2014): 3753.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Fong, A. C. M., and S. C. Hui. 2006. Multimedia Engineering. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Roesle, Matthew Lind. 2013. Boiling Heat Transfer in Dilute Emulsions. Edited by Francis A. Kulacki. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bonet, Maria Luisa, and Sam Buss. 2012. “An Improved Separation of Regular Resolution from Pool Resolution and Clause Learning.” In Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2012: 15th International Conference, Trento, Italy, June 17-20, 2012. Proceedings, edited by Alessandro Cimatti and Roberto Sebastiani, 44–57. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, David Hutchison, Takeo Kanade, Josef Kittler, Jon M. Kleinberg, Friedemann Mattern, John C. Mitchell, Moni Naor, et al. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Contemporary Arab Affairs.

Blog post

Andrews, Robin. 2017. “Pioneering ‘Mini-Pancreas’ Nullifies Woman’s Type 1 Diabetes.” IFLScience, IFLScience, May 19. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/pioneering-minipancreas-nullifies-womans-type-1-diabetes/.

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. 2014. Nanomanufacturing and U.S. Competitiveness: Challenges and Opportunities. GAO-14-618T. 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

Peterson, G. Greg. 2013. “Long-Term Effects of Care Management on Mortality, Hospitalizations, and Medicare Costs Among Chronically-Ill Medicare Beneficiaries.” Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University.

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

Wilson, Michael, and Colin Moynihan. 2017. “Witnesses Recall Deafening Blast and Shrapnel in Chelsea Bombing Trial.” New York Times, October 2, 2017.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bowen 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Bowen 2011; Yang and Gruebele 2003).

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

Two authors: (Yang and Gruebele 2003)
Three authors: (Aspinwall, Brown, and Tabery 2012)
4 or more authors: (Chen et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Contemporary Arab Affairs
Abbreviation	Contemp. Arab Aff.
ISSN (print)	1755-0912
ISSN (online)	1755-0920
Scope	Cultural Studies Political Science and International Relations