How to format your references using the Journal of Contemporary African Studies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Contemporary African 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	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

Baillie, J. Kenneth. 2014. “Translational Genomics. Targeting the Host Immune Response to Fight Infection.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 344 (6186): 807–808.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pfisterer, Andrea B., and Bernhard Schmid. 2002. “Diversity-Dependent Production Can Decrease the Stability of Ecosystem Functioning.” Nature 416 (6876): 84–86.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rowe, Timothy B., Thomas E. Macrini, and Zhe-Xi Luo. 2011. “Fossil Evidence on Origin of the Mammalian Brain.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 332 (6032): 955–957.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Seneviratne, Sonia I., Joeri Rogelj, Roland Séférian, Richard Wartenburger, Myles R. Allen, Michelle Cain, Richard J. Millar, et al. 2018. “The Many Possible Climates from the Paris Agreement’s Aim of 1.5 °C Warming.” Nature 558 (7708): 41–49.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Doldi, Laurent. 2005. Validation of Communications Systems with SDL. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Kortenkamp, Ulrich, Birgit Brandt, Christiane Benz, Götz Krummheuer, Silke Ladel, and Rose Vogel, eds. 2014. Early Mathematics Learning: Selected Papers of the POEM 2012 Conference. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Broccard, A. F., and F. Feihl. 2008. “Interactions Between the Pulmonary Circulation and Ventilation: An Overview for Intensivists.” In Respiratory System and Artificial Ventilation, edited by Umberto Lucangelo, Paolo Pelosi, Walter A. Zin, and Andrea Aliverti, 47–69. Milano: 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 Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

Blog post

Hale, Tom. 2016. “These Five Optical Illusions Will Make You Doubt Your Own Eyes.” IFLScience, IFLScience, July 1.

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. 2000. Environmental Protection Agency: Control of Air Pollution From New Motor Vehicles--Tier 2 Motor Vehicle Emissions Standards and Gasoline Sulfur Control Requirements. OGC-00-22. 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

Serrano, Melissa. 2017. “Bilingual Sentiment Analysis of Spanglish Tweets.” Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic 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

Shpigel, Ben. 2016. “Edmonton’s Abuzz? Think Prodigy.” New York Times, October 27, 2016.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Baillie 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Baillie 2014; Pfisterer and Schmid 2002).

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

Two authors: (Pfisterer and Schmid 2002)
Three authors: (Rowe, Macrini, and Luo 2011)
4 or more authors: (Seneviratne et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Contemporary African Studies
Abbreviation	J. Contemp. Afr. Stud.
ISSN (print)	0258-9001
ISSN (online)	1469-9397
Scope	Development Geography, Planning and Development Political Science and International Relations