How to format your references using the Computer citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Computer. 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	Download the output style file
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]

M. Sambridge, “Geophysics. An ensemble view of Earth’s inner core,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5606, pp. 529–530, Jan. 2003.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

D. S. Bellows and M. Tyers, “Cell biology. Chemical genetics hits,” Science, vol. 306, no. 5693, pp. 67–68, Oct. 2004.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. W. T. Talkington, G. Siuzdak, and J. R. Williamson, “An assembly landscape for the 30S ribosomal subunit,” Nature, vol. 438, no. 7068, pp. 628–632, Dec. 2005.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. G. Birnbaum et al., “Protein kinase C overactivity impairs prefrontal cortical regulation of working memory,” Science, vol. 306, no. 5697, pp. 882–884, Oct. 2004.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

E. Lafontaine and M. Comet, Nanothermites. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016.

An edited book

[1]

A. A. Bavry, Acute Coronary Syndromes in Clinical Practice. London: Springer, 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

X. Qiu, J. Zhou, and X. Huang, “An Effective Feature Selection Method for Text Categorization,” in Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 15th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2011, Shenzhen, China, May 24-27, 2011, Proceedings, Part I, J. Z. Huang, L. Cao, and J. Srivastava, Eds., in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. , Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2011, pp. 50–61.

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 Computer.

Blog post

[1]

K. Hamilton, “Why Insights Of Nobel Physicists Could Revolutionize 21st-Century Computing,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/why-insights-of-nobel-physicists-could-revolutionize-21st-century-computing/

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, “Government Civilian Aircraft: Use of Government Aircraft by the Attorney General and FBI Director,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, GGD-90-84, Jun. 1990.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

S. E. Hey, “Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’: A look at ‘The Abyss of the Birds’ and socio-political issues, religion and performance practice in reference to the bible and the holocaust,” Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 2015.

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]

L. Greenhouse, “IN REVERSAL OF COURSE, JUSTICES, 5-4, BACK BAN ON ABORTION METHOD,” New York Times, p. A1, Apr. 19, 2007.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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	Computer
Abbreviation	Computer (Long Beach Calif.)
ISSN (print)	0018-9162
Scope	General Computer Science