How to format your references using the Critical Care citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Critical Care. 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. Bertrand G. Chemistry. The modest undressing of a silicon center. Science. 2004;305:783–5.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Chen EH, Olson EN. Unveiling the mechanisms of cell-cell fusion. Science. 2005;308:369–73.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Pham TCT, Kim HS, Yoon KB. Growth of uniformly oriented silica MFI and BEA zeolite films on substrates. Science. 2011;334:1533–8.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Toomey DR, Jousselin D, Dunn RA, Wilcock WSD, Detrick RS. Skew of mantle upwelling beneath the East Pacific Rise governs segmentation. Nature. 2007;446:409–14.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Vincoli JW. Basic Guide to System Safety. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2014.

An edited book

1. Guimarães KS, Panchenko A, Przytycka TM, editors. Advances in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: 4th Brazilian Symposium on Bioinformatics, BSB 2009, Porto Alegre, Brazil, July 29-31, 2009. Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Marx D. Chordal Deletion Is Fixed-Parameter Tractable. In: Fomin FV, editor. Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science: 32nd International Workshop, WG 2006, Bergen, Norway, June 22-24, 2006 Revised Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. p. 37–48.

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 Critical Care.

Blog post

1. Andrews R. Wet Asteroids Brought Water To A Magma-Covered Ancient Moon [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/wet-asteroids-brought-water-magma-covered-ancient-moon/

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. Transportation Infrastructure: Advantages and Disadvantages of Wrap-Up Insurance for Large Construction Projects. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1999 Jun. Report No.: RCED-99-155.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. El-Amine Z. Waking Up in Beirut [Doctoral dissertation]. [College Park, MD]: University of Maryland, College Park; 2010.

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. Versatile Met Tries to Pull a Murphy. New York Times. 2016 Sep 14;B13.

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	Critical Care
Abbreviation	Crit. Care
ISSN (online)	1364-8535
Scope	Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine General Medicine