How to format your references using the Health Services Research citation style

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

Friedman, W. E. 2013. “Plant Science. One Genome, Two Ontogenies.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 339(6123): 1045–1046.

A journal article with 2 authors

Pasare, C. and R. Medzhitov. 2003. “Toll Pathway-Dependent Blockade of CD4+CD25+ T Cell-Mediated Suppression by Dendritic Cells.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 299(5609): 1033–1036.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sharma, B. R., A. Manjanath, and A. K. Singh. 2014. “Pentahexoctite: A New Two-Dimensional Allotrope of Carbon.” Scientific reports, 4: 7164.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Han, T., T. Yuan, B. Li, and C.-W. Qiu. 2013. “Homogeneous Thermal Cloak with Constant Conductivity and Tunable Heat Localization.” Scientific reports, 3: 1593.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

van Vreeswijk, M., J. Broersen, and G. Schurink. 2014. Mindfulness and Schema Therapy, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Kravets, A., M. Shcherbakov, M. Kultsova, and T. Iijima eds. 2014. Knowledge-Based Software Engineering: 11th Joint Conference, JCKBSE 2014, Volgograd, Russia, September 17-20, 2014. Proceedings, Communications in Computer and Information Science, Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Muhammad, A., N. Wiratunga, and R. Lothian. 2015. “Context-Aware Sentiment Analysis of Social Media.” In Advances in Social Media Analysis, edited by M. M. Gaber, M. Cocea, N. Wiratunga, and A. Goker, Studies in Computational Intelligence, pp. 87–104. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Services Research.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014. “Amazingly Intricate Spider Web Uses Suspended Rock As An Anchor,” IFLScience, IFLScience [accessed on October 30, 2018]. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/awesome-spider-dangles-rock-web/.

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. 1990. “Federal Research: Assessment of the Financial Audit for SEMATECH’s Activities in 1988,” RCED-90-35, 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

Tucker, M. T. 2009. Structure-Property Stress State Dependent Relationships under Varying Strain Rates. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi State, MS: Mississippi State 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

Crow, K. 2001. “Fireman’s Spirit Is the Wind Beneath a Bird’s Wings.” New York Times: 146.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Friedman 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Friedman 2013; Pasare and Medzhitov 2003).

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

Two authors: (Pasare and Medzhitov 2003)
Three authors: (Sharma, Manjanath, and Singh 2014)
4 or more authors: (Han et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Health Services Research
Abbreviation	Health Serv. Res.
ISSN (print)	0017-9124
ISSN (online)	1475-6773
Scope	Health Policy