How to format your references using the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. 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

Marquet, P. A. 2002. Ecology. Of predators, prey, and power laws. Science (New York, N.Y.) 295(5563):2229–2230.

A journal article with 2 authors

Nesbit, J., and C. Norman. 2011. 2010 Visualization Challenge. Science (New York, N.Y.) 331(6019):847–856.

A journal article with 3 authors

Goebel, T., M. R. Waters, and D. H. O’Rourke. 2008. The late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas. Science (New York, N.Y.) 319(5869):1497–1502.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Rad, R., L. Rad, W. Wang, J. Cadinanos, G. Vassiliou, S. Rice, L. S. Campos, K. Yusa, R. Banerjee, M. A. Li, J. de la Rosa, A. Strong, D. Lu, P. Ellis, N. Conte, F. T. Yang, P. Liu, and A. Bradley. 2010. PiggyBac transposon mutagenesis: a tool for cancer gene discovery in mice. Science (New York, N.Y.) 330(6007):1104–1107.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Neupert, R. 2011. French Animation History. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Demazeau, Y., J. P. Müller, J. M. C. Rodríguez, and J. B. Pérez, editors. 2012. Advances on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: 10th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Scheller, T., and E. Kühn. 2013. Usability Evaluation of Configuration-Based API Design Concepts. Pages 54–73 in A. Holzinger, M. Ziefle, M. Hitz, and M. Debevc, editors. Human Factors in Computing and Informatics: First International Conference, SouthCHI 2013, Maribor, Slovenia, July 1-3, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Transactions of the American Fisheries Society.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. 2017, May 17. The First True-Color Images Of Saturn’s North Pole Hurricane Are Stunning. IFLScience.

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. 2007. Very Light Jets: Several Factors Could Influence Their Effect on the National Airspace System. U.S. Government Printing Office, GAO-07-1001, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Caprile, J. A. 2016. The geochemical influence of trace element concentrations from marine sedimentary bedrock on freshwater streams in the western Transverse Mountain Ranges. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

James, S. 2017, March 13. Recalling the Plague Years. New York Times:F28.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Marquet 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Marquet 2002; Nesbit and Norman 2011).

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

Two authors: (Nesbit and Norman 2011)
Three or more authors: (Rad et al. 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Transactions of the American Fisheries Society
Abbreviation	Trans. Am. Fish. Soc.
ISSN (print)	0002-8487
ISSN (online)	1548-8659
Scope	Aquatic Science Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics