How to format your references using the Formal Methods in System Design citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Formal Methods in System Design. 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

Blumenthal MS (2013) National Academy of Sciences: Move with the times. Nature 494:423–424

A journal article with 2 authors

Beagle SD, Lockless SW (2015) Microbiology: Electrical signalling goes bacterial. Nature 527:44–45

A journal article with 3 authors

Schmitz D, Mellor J, Nicoll RA (2001) Presynaptic kainate receptor mediation of frequency facilitation at hippocampal mossy fiber synapses. Science 291:1972–1976

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Giurfa M, Zhang S, Jenett A, et al (2001) The concepts of “sameness” and “difference” in an insect. Nature 410:930–933

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bertolo D (2016) Interactions on Digital Tablets in the Context of 3D Geometry Learning. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Iba H (2012) Practical Applications of Evolutionary Computation to Financial Engineering: Robust Techniques for Forecasting, Trading and Hedging. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Shaul S, Katzir T, Primor L, Lipka O (2016) A Cognitive and Linguistic Approach to Predicting and Remediating Word Reading Difficulties in Young Readers. In: Schiff R, Joshi RM (eds) Interventions in Learning Disabilities: A Handbook on Systematic Training Programs for Individuals with Learning Disabilities. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 47–66

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 Formal Methods in System Design.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Reptiles That Delay Sex And Kids Live Longer. In: IFLScience. 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 (2016) Global Positioning System: Observations on Quarterly Reports from the Air Force. 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

Ellerbrock G (2017) Intergenerational Ontology & Leadership: Uniting the Multigenerational Workforce. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine 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

Kanter J, Kitsantonis N (2017) Eurozone Agrees to Greece Debt Talks in Exchange for Bailout Payments. New York Times B4

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	Formal Methods in System Design
Abbreviation	Form. Methods Syst. Des.
ISSN (print)	0925-9856
ISSN (online)	1572-8102
Scope	Hardware and Architecture Software Theoretical Computer Science