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

Laughlin G (2015) Astronomy: A Mars-sized exoplanet. Nature 522:290–291

A journal article with 2 authors

Čorić I, List B (2012) Asymmetric spiroacetalization catalysed by confined Brønsted acids. Nature 483:315–319

A journal article with 3 authors

Smilkov D, Hidalgo CA, Kocarev L (2014) Beyond network structure: How heterogeneous susceptibility modulates the spread of epidemics. Sci Rep 4:4795

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Pertz O, Hodgson L, Klemke RL, Hahn KM (2006) Spatiotemporal dynamics of RhoA activity in migrating cells. Nature 440:1069–1072

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Krings A, Braham RR (2008) Guide to Tendrillate Climbers of Costa Rican Mountains. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Nakashizuka T (2007) Sustainability and Diversity of Forest Ecosystems: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Springer Japan, Tokyo

A chapter in an edited book

Kalnins A, Barzdins J (2016) Metamodel Specialization for DSL Tool Building. In: Arnicans G, Arnicane V, Borzovs J, Niedrite L (eds) Databases and Information Systems: 12th International Baltic Conference, DB&IS 2016, Riga, Latvia, July 4-6, 2016, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 68–82

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

Fang J (2014) A Man’s Arachnophobia Was Literally Cut Out Of His Brain. 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 (1986) The School Dropout Problem. 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

Venegas Carro GI (2017) The Slow Movements of Anton Bruckner’s Symphonies: Dialogical Perspectives. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona

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

Feeney K (2011) A Focus on Cheese. New York Times NJ10

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

Research and Writing Guides