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

Jones DT (2003) Structural biology. Learning to speak the language of proteins. Science 302:1347–1348

A journal article with 2 authors

Freed AM, Bürgmann R (2004) Evidence of power-law flow in the Mojave desert mantle. Nature 430:548–551

A journal article with 3 authors

Kildishev AV, Boltasseva A, Shalaev VM (2013) Planar photonics with metasurfaces. Science 339:1232009

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Kosmeier S, De Luca AC, Zolotovskaya S, et al (2013) Coherent control of plasmonic nanoantennas using optical eigenmodes. Sci Rep 3:1808

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Reeder L (2010) Guide to Green Building Rating Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Vukasović M, Maassen P, Nerland M, et al (eds) (2012) Effects of Higher Education Reforms: Change Dynamics. SensePublishers, Rotterdam

A chapter in an edited book

Yao Y, Fu R (2013) The Concept of Reducts in Pawlak Three-Step Rough Set Analysis. In: Peters JF, Skowron A, Ramanna S, et al. (eds) Transactions on Rough Sets XVI. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 53–72

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

Fang J (2014) Primordial Cold Spot Caused By Supervoid. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/primordial-cold-spot-caused-supervoid/. 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 (2013) Pipeline Safety: Better Data and Guidance Needed to Improve Pipeline Operator Incident Response. 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

Ward S (2009) Historiography, prophecy, and literature: “Divina retribución” and its underlying ideological agenda. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana 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

Kolomatsky M (2017) Top Degrees for Homeownership. New York Times RE2

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Jones 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Jones 2003; Freed and Bürgmann 2004).

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

Two authors: (Freed and Bürgmann 2004)
Three or more authors: (Kosmeier et al. 2013)

About the journal

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

Research and Writing Guides