How to format your references using the Empirical Software Engineering citation style

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

Leonhardt U (2013) Applied physics: cloaking of heat. Nature 498:440–441

A journal article with 2 authors

Binder P-M, Pipes RM (2014) Applied mathematics: how chaos forgets and remembers. Nature 510:343–344

A journal article with 3 authors

Usuki F, Fujimura M, Yamashita A (2013) Endoplasmic reticulum stress preconditioning attenuates methylmercury-induced cellular damage by inducing favorable stress responses. Sci Rep 3:2346

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Matsubara Y, Chiba T, Kashimada K, et al (2014) Transcription activator-like effector nuclease-mediated transduction of exogenous gene into IL2RG locus. Sci Rep 4:5043

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wallgren A, Wallgren B (2014) Register-Based Statistics. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Baasten MFJ, Munk R (eds) (2007) Studies in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Culture: Presented to Albert van der Heide on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Gregory TR (2013) Molecules and Macroevolution: A Gouldian View of the Genome. In: Danieli GA, Minelli A, Pievani T (eds) Stephen J. Gould: The Scientific Legacy. Springer, Milano, pp 53–72

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 Empirical Software Engineering.

Blog post

Taub B (2017) Can You Solve This First Grade Math Problem? In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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

Government Accountability Office (2010) Aviation Security: TSA Is Increasing Procurement and Deployment of the Advanced Imaging Technology, but Challenges to This Effort and Other Areas of Aviation Security Remain. 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

Hendry M (2014) The Lonely Nineteenth Century: Loneliness and the Female Protagonist in the Victorian Novel. Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana

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

Crow K (2002) Is There a Little Bistro Inside All That Construction? New York Times 147

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Leonhardt 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Leonhardt 2013; Binder and Pipes 2014).

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

Two authors: (Binder and Pipes 2014)
Three or more authors: (Matsubara et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Empirical Software Engineering
Abbreviation	Empir. Softw. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1382-3256
ISSN (online)	1573-7616
Scope	Software