How to format your references using the European Surgery citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for European 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	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. Southwell K. Quantum coherence. Nature. 2008;453:1003.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. De Yoreo JJ, Dove PM. Materials science. Shaping crystals with biomolecules. Science. 2004;306:1301–2.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Xu B, Wang Q, Tian Y. Bulk modulus for polar covalent crystals. Sci Rep. 2013;3:3068.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Shao Y, Lu N, Wu Z, Cai C, Wang S, Zhang L-L, et al. Creating a functional single-chromosome yeast. Nature. 2018;560:331–5.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Bottjer DJ. Paleoecology. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2016.

An edited book

1. Eismont P, Konstantinova N, editors. Language, Music, and Computing: First International Workshop, LMAC 2015, St. Petersburg, Russia, April 20-22, 2015, Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Epstein SL, Petrovic S. Learning a Mixture of Search Heuristics. In: Hamadi Y, Monfroy E, Saubion F, editors. Autonomous Search. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2012. p. 97–127.

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 European Surgery.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. Supplements Are An Expensive And Potentially Toxic Lucky Dip [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/supplements-are-expensive-and-potentially-toxic-lucky-dip/

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. Schools and Libraries Program: Update on State-Level Funding by Category of Service. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2001 May. Report No.: GAO-01-673.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Sharp LM. Creative nonfiction illuminated: Cross-disciplinary spotlights [Doctoral dissertation]. [Tucson, AZ]: University of Arizona; 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

1. Vecsey G. A Light in Captivity, and a Subject for Writing. New York Times. 2012 Jun 28;B11.

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	European Surgery
Abbreviation	Eur. Surg.
ISSN (print)	1682-8631
ISSN (online)	1682-4016
Scope	Surgery