How to format your references using the Decision Support Systems citation style

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

P.B. Messersmith, Materials science. Multitasking in tissues and materials, Science. 319 (2008) 1767–1768.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M. Henriksen-Lacey, J.J. Giner-Casares, Nice to know you, Science. 349 (2015) 1254.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

E. Lee, N.B. Pandey, A.S. Popel, Lymphatic endothelial cells support tumor growth in breast cancer, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5853.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Zhang, C. Wang, T.D. Otto, J. Oberstaller, X. Liao, S.R. Adapa, K. Udenze, I.F. Bronner, D. Casandra, M. Mayho, J. Brown, S. Li, J. Swanson, J.C. Rayner, R.H.Y. Jiang, J.H. Adams, Uncovering the essential genes of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum by saturation mutagenesis, Science. 360 (2018).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

N. Rodgers, Learning to Reason, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2000.

An edited book

[1]

J. Gibson, Optical Flow and Trajectory Estimation Methods, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A.A. Okecha, N.E. Newton-Fisher, The Diet of Olive Baboons (Papio anubis) in the Budongo Forest Reserve, Uganda, in: N.E. Newton-Fisher, H. Notman, J.D. Paterson, V. Reynolds (Eds.), Primates of Western Uganda, Springer, New York, NY, 2006: pp. 61–73.

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 Support Systems.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two Thirds Of Europeans, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/handful-bronze-age-men-could-have-fathered-two-thirds-europeans/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, ADA Paratransit Services: Survey of Public Transit Agency Officials on Services and Costs (GAO-13-18SP, November, 2012), an E-supplement to GAO-13-17, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2012.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A.O. Ballan, The selfie generation: Students’ perceptions of classroom incivility in social work education, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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]

A. Tommasini, C. da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM, J.R. Oestreich, D. Allen, Sex and Death: It Must Be Opera, New York Times. (2017) AR50.

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	Decision Support Systems
Abbreviation	Decis. Support Syst.
ISSN (print)	0167-9236
Scope	Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Management Information Systems Information Systems Information Systems and Management Developmental and Educational Psychology