How to format your references using the Health policy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Health policy. 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]

Basu P. Vaccines on trial. Nature 2005;436:484.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Zhang W, Luck SJ. Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory. Nature 2008;453:233–5.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Carpenter SJ, Erickson JM, Holland FD Jr. Migration of a Late Cretaceous fish. Nature 2003;423:70–4.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Pang B, Cheng S, Sun S-P, An C, Liu Z-Y, Feng X, et al. Prognostic role of PIK3CA mutations and their association with hormone receptor expression in breast cancer: a meta-analysis. Sci Rep 2014;4:6255.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Mitra A. Fundamentals of Quality Control and Improvement. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2008.

An edited book

[1]

Rudek MA, Chau CH, Figg WD, McLeod HL, editors. Handbook of Anticancer Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics. 2nd ed. 2014. New York, NY: Springer; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Mak P-I, Martins RP. A Mixed-Voltage Unified Receiver Front-End for Full-Band Mobile TV in 65-nm CMOS. In: Martins RP, editor. High-/Mixed-Voltage Analog and RF Circuit Techniques for Nanoscale CMOS, New York, NY: Springer; 2012, p. 81–119.

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 Health policy.

Blog post

[1]

Carpineti A. Newly Discovered Gibbon Named After Star Wars Character. IFLScience 2017. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/newly-discovered-gibbon-named-after-star-wars-character/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office. Preliminary Observations on the Potential Effects of the Proposed Performance Rights Act on the Recording and Broadcast Radio Industries. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2010.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Valley MT. Deciphering the function of granule cell interneurons in the mouse main olfactory bulb: Insights from adult neurogenesis and local-field potentials. Doctoral dissertation. Columbia University, 2010.

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]

Dorman JL. Art Deco Los Angeles. New York Times 2016:TR1.

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	Health policy
Abbreviation	Health Policy
ISSN (print)	0168-8510
Scope	Health Policy