How to format your references using the First Monday citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for First Monday. 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
G. Benford, 2000. “Taking control,” Nature, volume 406, number 6795, p. 462.
A journal article with 2 authors
J. Magarian Blander and Derk Amsen, 2009. “Immunology. Amino acid addiction,” Science (New York, N.Y.), volume 324, number 5932, pp. 1282–1283.
A journal article with 3 authors
Thomas J. Jönsson, Lynnette C. Johnson and W. Todd Lowther, 2008. “Structure of the sulphiredoxin-peroxiredoxin complex reveals an essential repair embrace,” Nature, volume 451, number 7174, pp. 98–101.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
David A. Kroodsma, Juan Mayorga, Timothy Hochberg, Nathan A. Miller, Kristina Boerder, Francesco Ferretti, Alex Wilson, Bjorn Bergman, Timothy D. White, Barbara A. Block, Paul Woods, Brian Sullivan, Christopher Costello and Boris Worm, 2018. “Response to Comment on ‘Tracking the global footprint of fisheries,’” Science (New York, N.Y.), volume 361, number 6404.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Stanislaw Raczynski, 2006. Modeling and Simulation, Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Yi-Kuei Lin, Yu-Chung Tsao and Shi-Woei Lin edsAA, 2013. Proceedings of the Institute of Industrial Engineers Asian Conference 2013, Singapore: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Pingping Lu, Qing Liu and Jianming Guo, 2016. “Camera Calibration Implementation Based on Zhang Zhengyou Plane Method,” In: Y. Jia, J. Du, H. Li and W. Zhang (editors). Proceedings of the 2015 Chinese Intelligent Systems Conference: Volume 1, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 29–40.

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 First Monday.

Blog post
Janet Fang, 2016. “Female Birds Sing To Tell Predators To Back Off,” IFLScience, at https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/female-birds-sing-to-tell-predators-to-back-off/, 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, 1981. NASA’s Standard Parts Program--Are the Objectives Being Accomplished?, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Jennis White, 2014. Support group for family caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients: A grant proposal, Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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
James Poniewozik, 2016. “A TV Show That’s Amazing, Not Necessarily Good,” New York Times, p. C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Benford, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Benford, 2000; Blander and Amsen, 2009).

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

  • Two authors: (Blander and Amsen, 2009)
  • Three or more authors: (Kroodsma et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal titleFirst Monday
ISSN (print)1396-0466
ScopeComputer Networks and Communications
Human-Computer Interaction
Law

Other styles