Style Error: American Journal of Public Health

jcfine10
1) The numbered references in the Word document (when you "Add Citation) is showing up in the following format: (1). Instead, it should be showing as a superscript number without parenthesis.
2) The journal articles in the bibliography need to be italicized. If it's not a journal, then any newspaper name, newsletter name or other should be italicized.
3) When citing a website or a write-up/PDF available on a website, the AJPH citation is not inputting a date that the website was accessed and instead includes a bracketed [cited 2010 Jul 10] with a semi-colon after it...it's all incorrect formatting. For instance, Zotero put down the following in a Bibliography:
Nutrition Fact Sheet - DASH/HealthyYouth [Internet]. [cited 2010 Jul 10];Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/nutrition/facts.htm

It really should be set up as:
DASH/HealthyYouth. Nutrition Fact Sheet. 2008. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/nutrition/facts.htm. Accessed July 10, 2010.

Another example is:
Our Story - Revolution Foods [Internet]. [cited 2010 Jul 11];Available from: http://www.revfoods.com/browse/about_us

It really should be set up as:
Our story. Revolution Foods website. 2010. Available at: http://www.revfoods.com/browse/about_us. Accessed July 11, 2010.

4) Another issue is that for non-journal citations, the AJPH citation is not including a period at the end of the citation. Some just end with semi-colons and some just have no ending period or mark of any kind.

Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    Do you have a link to a style guide for this?
    Right now, AJPH just links to a generic Vancouver style - there is a Vancouver with superscript on the repository, but Vancouver afaik never uses italics, so we'd have to take a closer look.
  • noksagt
    The guide for authors states "All references except where noted otherwise should be formatted according to the AMA Manual of Style, 10th Edition." The style is, therefore, dependent on Vancouver. I see no instructions for authors that state any of those differences. Issue 4 sounds like a possible fundamental issue with the Vancouver CSL that should be fixed if it is the case.
  • adamsmith
    yeah - the Vancouver thing is a big mess - for some reason we have Vancouver and NLM and AMA - which should all be the same, but aren't quite - I've mostly worked on NLM and I think it's the best of the three, so maybe it would be a good idea to turn them into dependents - which we should best discuss in a separate thread. One of the obstacles I see is that both Vancouver and NLM come with the client - I somewhere posted about this some time back, but Dan seemed disinclined to change the styles delivered with the client for some reason.

    Also, for a lot of medical and biological journals there appears to be a strange disconnect between authors' instruction and journal citations.
  • jcfine10
    Unfortunately, there is no dedicated AJPH-only citation guideline, but it is definitely based on AMA principles. I am not 100% sure what the differences are between them but I usually go to an AJPH article when I am checking how to set it up, and I look at the Reference List at the end of an AJPH article to confirm. This is what our professors have required us to do.

    Just as an experiment, I changed my document prefs to AMA citation style to see how it looked and it has all the superscripts, italicizations, and even issue #4 seems to be somewhat resolved. It does not look anything like the Vancouver style which you say is the basis for the AJPH citation. However, it looks correct now and I think the AJPH citation style should be changed so that it is dependent on the AMA citation style and not Vancouver.

    Thanks so much!
  • jcfine10
    Also, the AJPH refers to the AMA citation style in this link: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/misc/ama_references.shtml. Also, the AJPH states @ http://ajph.aphapublications.org/misc/production.shtml: "Follow the AMA Manual of Style to format your references. For Public Health Then and Now and Public Health Matters ONLY, authors may follow endnote style (Documentation 1) in the Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed. 1993:487-635)."

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