How to format your references using the Evolving Systems citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Evolving Systems. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Cohen J (2015) AIDS. No end in sight. Science 349:230–231
A journal article with 2 authors
Finkel T, Holbrook NJ (2000) Oxidants, oxidative stress and the biology of ageing. Nature 408:239–247
A journal article with 3 authors
Tenenbaum JB, de Silva V, Langford JC (2000) A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Science 290:2319–2323
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Nakatsuji S, Nambu Y, Tonomura H, et al (2005) Spin disorder on a triangular lattice. Science 309:1697–1700

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Voit B, Haag R, Appelhans D, Welzel PB (2016) Bio- and Multifunctional Polymer Architectures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ
An edited book
Cagle PT (2010) Frozen Section Library: Pleura. Springer US, Boston, MA
A chapter in an edited book
Wang Y, Liang Z, Shen L (2015) Global Sufficient Conditions for Nonconvex Cubic Minimization Problem with Box Constraints. In: Gao D, Ruan N, Xing W (eds) Advances in Global Optimization. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 33–40

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 Evolving Systems.

Blog post
Andrew E (2015) Eye Drops Could Cure Cataracts – And Long-Sightedness. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/eye-drops-could-cure-cataracts-and-long-sightedness/. 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 (1985) Concerns Over Labor’s Ability To Implement the Job Training Partnership Act. 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
Seegmiller Renner A (2017) Empathy Development Through Role Modeling: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Experiences. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University

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
Rothenberg B (2017) Nadal Seeks to Recapture Wimbledon Success. New York Times B13

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Cohen 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Finkel and Holbrook 2000; Cohen 2015).

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

  • Two authors: (Finkel and Holbrook 2000)
  • Three or more authors: (Nakatsuji et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleEvolving Systems
ISSN (print)1868-6478
ISSN (online)1868-6486
ScopeComputer Science Applications
Control and Systems Engineering
Control and Optimization
Modelling and Simulation

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