How to format your references using the Autonomous Robots citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Autonomous Robots. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Offerman, S. E. (2004). Materials science. Microstructures in 4D. Science (New York, N.Y.), 305(5681), 190–191.
A journal article with 2 authors
Casavecchia, P., & Alexander, M. H. (2013). Chemistry. Uncloaking the quantum nature of inelastic molecular collisions. Science (New York, N.Y.), 341(6150), 1076–1077.
A journal article with 3 authors
Dawkins, M. S., Donnelly, C. A., & Jones, T. A. (2004). Chicken welfare is influenced more by housing conditions than by stocking density. Nature, 427(6972), 342–344.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Dehlinger, G., Diehl, L., Gennser, U., Sigg, H., Faist, J., Ensslin, K., et al. (2000). Intersubband electroluminescence from silicon-based quantum cascade structures. Science (New York, N.Y.), 290(5500), 2277–2280.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Schulze, V. (2005). Modern Mechanical Surface Treatment. Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.
An edited book
Manna, Z., & Peled, D. A. (Eds.). (2010). Time for Verification: Essays in Memory of Amir Pnueli (Vol. 6200). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Cao, Z. (2007). A Complete Probabilistic Belief Logic. In K. Inoue, K. Satoh, & F. Toni (Eds.), Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems: 7th International Workshop, CLIMA VII, Hakodate, Japan, May 8-9, 2006, Revised Selected and Invited Papers (pp. 80–94). Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Autonomous Robots.

Blog post
Luntz, S. (2014, June 29). Superconductor Record Broken. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/physics/superconductor-record-broken/. Accessed 30 October 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. (2015). Auto Safety: Status of NHTSA’s Redesign of Its Crashworthiness Data System (No. GAO-15-334). 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
Bradford, J. (2012). Commutative endomorphism rings of simple abelian varieties over finite fields (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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
Isherwood, C. (2016, January 15). British Inmates Learning Lessons, or Not. New York Times, p. C2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Offerman 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Casavecchia and Alexander 2013; Offerman 2004).

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

  • Two authors: (Casavecchia and Alexander 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Dehlinger et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal titleAutonomous Robots
AbbreviationAuton. Robots
ISSN (print)0929-5593
ISSN (online)1573-7527
ScopeArtificial Intelligence

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