How to format your references using the Forensic Science International citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Forensic Science International. 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	Download the output style file
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]

R.A. DiBiase, Earth science: River incision revisited, Nature. 505 (2014) 294–295.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

T.W. Nilsen, B.R. Graveley, Expansion of the eukaryotic proteome by alternative splicing, Nature. 463 (2010) 457–463.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

D.L. Royer, C.P. Osborne, D.J. Beerling, Carbon loss by deciduous trees in a CO2-rich ancient polar environment, Nature. 424 (2003) 60–62.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. Kaneko, T. Sakuma, T. Yamamoto, T. Mashimo, Simple knockout by electroporation of engineered endonucleases into intact rat embryos, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 6382.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A. Lemma, Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, England, 2008.

An edited book

[1]

M.-C. Wong, Parallel Power Electronics Filters in Three-Phase Four-Wire Systems: Principle, Control and Design, Springer, Singapore, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Fornés, S. Escalera, J. LLadós, G. Sánchez, P. Radeva, O. Pujol, Handwritten Symbol Recognition by a Boosted Blurred Shape Model with Error Correction, in: J. Martí, J.M. Benedí, A.M. Mendonça, J. Serrat (Eds.), Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: Third Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2007, Girona, Spain, June 6-8, 2007, Proceedings, Part I, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007: pp. 13–21.

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 Forensic Science International.

Blog post

[1]

B. Taub, Quitting Smoking Reverses Dopamine Deficits In The Brain, IFLScience. (2016).

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, Highlights of a Forum: Transforming Transportation Policy for the 21st Century, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2007.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D.W. Purdy, Identifying Shallow Foundation Failure Modes and Mechanisms Using Surveillance of a Transparent Granular Soil Surrogate, Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 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

[1]

M. Pilon, Rhythmic Gymnastics Judges Cleared, New York Times. (2013) B14.

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	Forensic Science International
Abbreviation	Forensic Sci. Int.
ISSN (print)	0379-0738
Scope	Pathology and Forensic Medicine