How to format your references using the AAPS Open citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for AAPS Open. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Stocum DL (2002) Development. A tail of transdifferentiation. Science 298:1901–1903

A journal article with 2 authors

Raser JM, O’Shea EK (2005) Noise in gene expression: origins, consequences, and control. Science 309:2010–2013

A journal article with 3 authors

Knill E, Laflamme R, Milburn GJ (2001) A scheme for efficient quantum computation with linear optics. Nature 409:46–52

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Kawamura Y, Saito K, Kin T, et al (2008) Drosophila endogenous small RNAs bind to Argonaute 2 in somatic cells. Nature 453:793–797

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Alexandridis AK, Zapranis AD (2014) Wavelet Neural Networks. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Avram NM, Brik MG (eds) (2013) Optical Properties of 3d-Ions in Crystals: Spectroscopy and Crystal Field Analysis. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Webster C (2015) Spanish- and English-Speaking Hispanic Subcultural Consumption Differences. In: Bahn KD (ed) Proceedings of the 1988 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 18–22

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 AAPS Open.

Blog post

Hamilton K (2015) This Is What Your Brain Looks Like With Alzheimer’s Disease. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1978) U.S. Economic Aid for the West Bank and Gaza. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Vlajic NA (2014) Dynamics of slender, flexible structures. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Branch J (2017) Fans, Please Rise (No, Not for Beer). New York Times D1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Stocum 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Stocum 2002; Raser and O’Shea 2005).

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

Two authors: (Raser and O’Shea 2005)
Three or more authors: (Kawamura et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	AAPS Open
Abbreviation	AAPS Open
ISSN (online)	2364-9534
Scope