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

Gulledge J (2011) Debt crisis: Crunch time for US science. Nature 477:155–156

A journal article with 2 authors

Pokrovski GS, Dubrovinsky LS (2011) The S3- ion is stable in geological fluids at elevated temperatures and pressures. Science 331:1052–1054

A journal article with 3 authors

Tanimura H, Kanasaki J, Tanimura K (2014) State-resolved ultrafast dynamics of impact ionization in InSb. Sci Rep 4:6849

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Larson DR, Zipfel WR, Williams RM, et al (2003) Water-soluble quantum dots for multiphoton fluorescence imaging in vivo. Science 300:1434–1436

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Guillaume P (2006) Music and Acoustics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Cattaneo C (2011) Relatività generale. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Allo P (2013) Noisy vs. Merely Equivocal Logics. In: Tanaka K, Berto F, Mares E, Paoli F (eds) Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 57–79

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

Carpineti A (2017) Early Universe Discovery Might Help Explain How Galaxies Got So Big So Quickly. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/early-universe-discovery-might-help-explain-how-galaxies-got-so-big-so-quickly/. 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 (1986) Data Processing: SBA Needs To Strengthen Management of Its Computer Systems. 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

Roberson KL (2017) Patient and Family Engagement Initiative: A Quantitative Causal-Comparative Analysis. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

St. John Kelly E (1997) Children Find Locks, Not Slides. New York Times 148

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