How to format your references using the EXCLI Journal citation style

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

Clack JA. Paleontology. From fins to fingers. Science. 2004;304:57–8.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kind R, Yuan X. Geophysics. Seismic images of the biggest crash on Earth. Science. 2010;329:1479–80.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gormley WT Jr, Phillips D, Gayer T. The early years. Preschool programs can boost school readiness. Science. 2008;320:1723–4.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Lin Y-M, Valdes-Garcia A, Han S-J, Farmer DB, Meric I, Sun Y, et al. Wafer-scale graphene integrated circuit. Science. 2011;332:1294–7.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ballast DK. Interior Detailing. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2010.

An edited book

Burke A. Pocket Reference to Alzheimer’s Disease Management. Hall GR, Yaari R, Fleisher A, Dougherty J, Young J, Brand H, et al., editors. Tarporley: Springer Healthcare Ltd.; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

Baracca A, Franconi R. The Decisive Leap in the 1980s: The Attainment of Cuba’s Scientific Autonomy. In: Franconi R, editor. Subalternity vs Hegemony, Cuba’s Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959-2014. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. p. 55–73. (SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology).

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 EXCLI Journal.

Blog post

Luntz S. Why It Is Not So Good To Be A Lone Wolf. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-it-not-so-good-be-lone-wolf/. accessed 30 October 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. Urban Mass Transportation Administration’s Enforcement of Buy America Provisions of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1988 May. Report No.: T-RCED-88-33.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Datta A. Speech Synthesis Using Unsupervised Learning [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2017.

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. With Her Surgeon Watching, Kvitova Shows Off Skilled Handiwork. New York Times. 2017;B9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Clack 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Clack 2004; Kind and Yuan 2010).

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

Two authors: (Kind and Yuan 2010)
Three or more authors: (Lin et al. 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	EXCLI Journal
ISSN (online)	1611-2156
Scope