How to format your references using the Digestive Surgery citation style

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

Blow N. Antibodies: The generation game. Nature. 2007 Jun;447(7145):741–4.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kepinski S, Leyser O. The Arabidopsis F-box protein TIR1 is an auxin receptor. Nature. 2005 May;435(7041):446–51.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wechsler T, Newman S, West SC. Aberrant chromosome morphology in human cells defective for Holliday junction resolution. Nature. 2011 Mar;471(7340):642–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Griffith CA, Owen T, Geballe TR, Rayner J, Rannou P. Evidence for the exposure of water ice on Titan’s surface. Science. 2003 Apr;300(5619):628–30.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Eylert B. The Mobile Multimedia Business. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2006.

An edited book

Bojarski B, Mishchenko AS, Troitsky EV, Weber A, editors. C*-algebras and Elliptic Theory. Basel: Birkhäuser; 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang NL. Discovering Latent Structures: Experience with the CoIL Challenge 2000 Data Set. In: Shi Y, Albada GD van, Dongarra J, Sloot PMA, editors. Computational Science – ICCS 2007: 7th International Conference, Beijing, China, May 27 - 30, 2007, Proceedings, Part IV. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007; pp 26–34.

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 Digestive Surgery.

Blog post

Fang J. What Can Senior Citizen Slugs Teach Us About Age-Related Memory Loss? [Internet]. IFLScience. 2015 Aug [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/what-slow-snails-teach-us-about-memory-loss/

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. Administration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 in the Michigan and Ohio State Departments of Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1972.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Matheny AL. Home gardener preferences, perceptions, knowledge and behaviors associated with pest management strategies and information acquisition. 2009

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 M. Clinton’s Chief of Staff Ponders Undefined Post. New York Times. 1992 Dec;B6.

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	Digestive Surgery
Abbreviation	Dig. Surg.
ISSN (print)	0253-4886
ISSN (online)	1421-9883
Scope	Gastroenterology Surgery