How to format your references using the Computing citation style

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

Cherry M (2000) Construction starts on largest telescope in the south. Nature 407:4

A journal article with 2 authors

Kaproth BM, Marone C (2013) Slow earthquakes, preseismic velocity changes, and the origin of slow frictional stick-slip. Science 341:1229–1232

A journal article with 3 authors

Dawkins MS, Donnelly CA, Jones TA (2004) Chicken welfare is influenced more by housing conditions than by stocking density. Nature 427:342–344

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Choo B, Zhu M, Zhao W, et al (2014) The largest Silurian vertebrate and its palaeoecological implications. Sci Rep 4:5242

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zhang KQT (2015) Wireless Communications. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Paluszek M (2015) MATLAB Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach. Apress, Berkeley, CA

A chapter in an edited book

Hargittai I (2015) Peace Through Chemistry. In: Hargittai B, Hargittai I (eds) Culture of Chemistry: The Best Articles on the Human Side of 20th-Century Chemistry from the Archives of the Chemical Intelligencer. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 25–27

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 Computing.

Blog post

Fang J (2014) 101 Butterfly Genomes Explain Monarch Migration Prowess. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/101-butterfly-genomes-explain-monarch-migration-prowess/. 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 (2005) Digital Broadcast Television Transition: Several Challenges Could Arise in Administering a Subsidy Program for DTV Equipment. 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

Bowman K (2017) A Close Look at the 2014 Passage of the Illinois County School Facility Sales Tax in Greene County. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois 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

Kelly DA (2006) Video Catching Up to Photos When It Comes to Sharing. New York Times C11

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	Computing
ISSN (print)	0010-485X
ISSN (online)	1436-5057
Scope	Computational Theory and Mathematics Computer Science Applications Software Computational Mathematics Numerical Analysis Theoretical Computer Science