How to format your references using the Early Child Development and Care citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Early Child Development and Care. 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

Moorcock, M. (2000). Through the shaving mirror. Nature, 407(6803), 455.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pokrovski, G. S., & Dubrovinsky, L. S. (2011). The S3- ion is stable in geological fluids at elevated temperatures and pressures. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331(6020), 1052–1054.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lohman, D. J., Bickford, D., & Sodhi, N. S. (2007). Environment. The burning issue. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316(5823), 376.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Fleitmann, D., Burns, S. J., Mudelsee, M., Neff, U., Kramers, J., Mangini, A., & Matter, A. (2003). Holocene forcing of the Indian monsoon recorded in a stalagmite from southern Oman. Science (New York, N.Y.), 300(5626), 1737–1739.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pascoe, N. (2011). Reliability Technology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Rozenberg, G., Salomaa, A., Sempere, J. M., & Zandron, C. (Eds.). (2015). Membrane Computing: 16th International Conference, CMC 2015, Valencia, Spain, August 17-21, 2015, Revised Selected Papers (1st ed. 2015, Vol. 9504). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Parret, H. (2012). From the Enquiry (1757) to the Fourth Kritisches Wäldchen (1769): Burke and Herder on the Division of the Senses. In K. Vermeir & M. Funk Deckard (Eds.), The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (pp. 91–106). Springer Netherlands.

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 Early Child Development and Care.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, September 26). Awesome Anti-Gravity Water Experiment. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/awesome-anti-gravity-water-experiment/

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. (1991). Environmental Protection: Solving NASA’s Current Problems Requires Agencywide Emphasis (NSIAD-91-146). 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

Ball-Miles, N. M. (2014). The relationship between witnessing verbal marital conflict as a child and the behavioral anger responses in adulthood [Doctoral dissertation]. Capella 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

Billard, M. (2000, April 2). Activists, Afterward. New York Times, 141.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Moorcock, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Moorcock, 2000; Pokrovski & Dubrovinsky, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Pokrovski & Dubrovinsky, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Fleitmann et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Early Child Development and Care
Abbreviation	Early Child Dev. Care
ISSN (print)	0300-4430
ISSN (online)	1476-8275
Scope	Pediatrics Developmental and Educational Psychology Social Psychology