How to format your references using the Digital Communications and Networks citation style

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

[1]

W. Triplett, Astronomers silenced in star-name wars, Nature. 406 (2000) 448.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B.C. Yoo, G. Lubec, p25 protein in neurodegeneration, Nature. 411 (2001) 763–4; discussion 764-5.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A.J. Cohen, P. Mori-Sánchez, W. Yang, Insights into current limitations of density functional theory, Science. 321 (2008) 792–794.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

W. Xu, T.-H. Kim, D. Zhai, J.C. Er, L. Zhang, A.A. Kale, B.K. Agrawalla, Y.-K. Cho, Y.-T. Chang, Make caffeine visible: a fluorescent caffeine “traffic light” detector, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 2255.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. Soustelle, Ionic and Electrochemical Equilibria, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2016.

An edited book

[1]

K.D. Sen, ed., Electronic Structure of Quantum Confined Atoms and Molecules, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

T. Ohlin, Birth of Internet Ethics, in: C. Gram, P. Rasmussen, S.D. Østergaard (Eds.), History of Nordic Computing 4: 4th IFIP WG 9.7 Conference, HiNC 4, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 13-15, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 34–40.

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 Digital Communications and Networks.

Blog post

[1]

S. Luntz, Mars Is Emerging From An Ice Age, Claims New Study, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-emerging-ice-age/ (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, NASA Procurement: Challenges Remain in Implementing Improvement Reforms, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1994.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M. Sanchez, For imagination and love – The permanence of the Mexican father who fathers at a distance, Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2012.

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]

J. Kanter, E.U. Opens Investigation of French Utility’s Taxes, New York Times. (2016) B5.

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	Digital Communications and Networks
Abbreviation	Digit. Commun. Netw.
ISSN (print)	2352-8648
Scope

Research and Writing Guides