How to format your references using the Decision citation style

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

Bernath, P. F. (2002). Laser chemistry. Water vapor gets excited. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5583), 943–945.

A journal article with 2 authors

Prüfer, K., & Meyer, M. (2015). Anthropology. Comment on “Late Pleistocene human skeleton and mtDNA link Paleoamericans and modern Native Americans.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 347(6224), 835.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rouse, G. W., Goffredi, S. K., & Vrijenhoek, R. C. (2004). Osedax: bone-eating marine worms with dwarf males. Science (New York, N.Y.), 305(5684), 668–671.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Nagai, S., Dubrana, K., Tsai-Pflugfelder, M., Davidson, M. B., Roberts, T. M., Brown, G. W., Varela, E., Hediger, F., Gasser, S. M., & Krogan, N. J. (2008). Functional targeting of DNA damage to a nuclear pore-associated SUMO-dependent ubiquitin ligase. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322(5901), 597–602.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Michael, E., Gillian, H., Stefan, K., & Alex, L. (2012). Gramsci. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

An edited book

Levy, T. E., Schneider, T., & Propp, W. H. C. (Eds.). (2015). Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Dąbrowski, S., Bazydło, P., & Szewczyk, R. (2015). Functional Performance Testing of Routing Devices in Networks Based on IQMESH Protocol. In R. Szewczyk, C. Zieliński, & M. Kaliczyńska (Eds.), Progress in Automation, Robotics and Measuring Techniques: Volume 3 Measuring Techniques and Systems (pp. 39–47). Springer International Publishing.

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 Decision.

Blog post

Taub, B. (2017, January 6). Virtual Reality Helps Scientists Recreate The Sounds Of Stonehenge. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/virtual-reality-helps-scientists-recreate-sounds-stonehenge/

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. (2006). Business Systems Modernization: Internal Revenue Service’s Fiscal Year 2006 Expenditure Plan (GAO-06-360). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Garyan, D. (2017). Converging origins: Never forget what happened in the future [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Borden, S. (2015, April 9). Cypriot Soccer: Bombed Cars 6, the Referees 0. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Bernath, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Bernath, 2002; Prüfer & Meyer, 2015).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Prüfer & Meyer, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Nagai et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Decision
Abbreviation	Decision (Wash., DC)
ISSN (print)	2325-9965
ISSN (online)	2325-9973
Scope