How to format your references using the Digital Investigation citation style

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

Blandford, R.D., 2002. Blood out of a stone. Science 295, 1653–1654.

A journal article with 2 authors

Weeds, A., Yeoh, S., 2001. Structure. Action at the Y-branch. Science 294, 1660–1661.

A journal article with 3 authors

Garner, H.R., McIver, L.J., Waitzkin, M.B., 2013. Research funding: Same work, twice the money? Nature 493, 599–601.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Liu, Z., Zhou, H., Wang, W., Tan, W., Fu, Y.-X., Zhu, M., 2014. A novel method for synthetic vaccine construction based on protein assembly. Sci. Rep. 4, 7266.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Callahan, K.R., Stetz, G.S., Brooks, L.M., 2011. Project Management Accounting. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Kurosu, M. (Ed.), 2014. Human-Computer Interaction. Theories, Methods, and Tools: 16th International Conference, HCI International 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 22-27, 2014, Proceedings, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Arestis, P., da Silva Bichara, J., Cunha, A.M., Filho, F.F., 2016. Brazil after the Great Recession: Searching for a Coherent Development Strategy, in: Pereira, A.W., Mattei, L. (Eds.), The Brazilian Economy Today: Towards a New Socio-Economic Model? Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, pp. 88–120.

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 Investigation.

Blog post

Fang, J., 2015. Fossil Teeth of Mysterious Hippo Ancestor Unearthed in Kenya [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/fossil-teeth-mysterious-hippo-ancestor-unearthed-kenya/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2008. Telecommunications: FCC Needs to Improve Performance Management and Strengthen Oversight of the High-Cost Program (No. GAO-08-633). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Maffia, R., 2014. Image matters: Then and now in televisions’ depiction of African Americans (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Yablonsky, L., 2007. Hotel Rooms Become Overnight Stars. New York Times AR22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Blandford, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Blandford, 2002; Weeds and Yeoh, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Weeds and Yeoh, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Digital Investigation
ISSN (print)	1742-2876
Scope	Computer Science Applications Law Medical Laboratory Technology