How to format your references using the Clinical Spine Surgery citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Clinical Spine Surgery. 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

1. Searls DB. The language of genes. Nature. 2002;420(6912):211–217.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Siomi H, Siomi MC. On the road to reading the RNA-interference code. Nature. 2009;457(7228):396–404.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Jia S, Noma K-I, Grewal SIS. RNAi-independent heterochromatin nucleation by the stress-activated ATF/CREB family proteins. Science. 2004;304(5679):1971–1976.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

1. Perry CT, Alvarez-Filip L, Graham NAJ, et al. Loss of coral reef growth capacity to track future increases in sea level. Nature. 2018;558(7710):396–400.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Bard J, Kovarik VJ Jr. Software Defined Radio. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2007.

An edited book

1. Austin B. Bacterial Fish Pathogens: Disease of Farmed and Wild Fish. 6th ed. 2016. (Austin DA, ed.). Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Abul-Soad AA, Mahdi SM, Markhand GS. Date Palm Status and Perspective in Pakistan. In: Al-Khayri JM, Jain SM, Johnson DV, eds. Date Palm Genetic Resources and Utilization: Volume 2: Asia and Europe. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2015:153–205.

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 Clinical Spine Surgery.

Blog post

1. Luntz S. Robotic Octopus Created. IFLScience. 2014.

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

1. Government Accountability Office. Federal Research Grants: Maintaining Public Accountability Without Inhibiting Creative Research. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1979.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Butts P. Green Roof Vegetable Production in Three Different Growth Media. 2017.

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

1. Wagner J. As Injury Carousel Spins, the Mets Keep Reeling. New York Times. July 9, 2017:SP4.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	Clinical Spine Surgery
Abbreviation	Clin. Spine Surg.
ISSN (print)	2380-0186
ISSN (online)	2380-0194
Scope	Clinical Neurology Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Surgery