How to format your references using the Heliyon citation style

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

[1]

R.A. Gatenby, A change of strategy in the war on cancer, Nature. 459 (2009) 508–509.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J.L. Heilbron, W.F. Bynum, 1903 and all that, Nature. 421 (2003) 15–18.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.H. Levine, Y. Lin, M.B. Elowitz, Functional roles of pulsing in genetic circuits, Science. 342 (2013) 1193–1200.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

X. Sun, X. Zhang, C. Schuck, H.X. Tang, Nonlinear optical effects of ultrahigh-Q silicon photonic nanocavities immersed in superfluid helium, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 1436.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J. Bowling, Diagnostic Dermoscopy, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

L. Denaro, D. D’Avella, V. Denaro, eds., Pitfalls in Cervical Spine Surgery: Avoidance and Management of Complications, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Z. Zhao, T. Liu, X. Hou, B. Li, X. Du, Distributed Text Representation with Weighting Scheme Guidance for Sentiment Analysis, in: F. Li, K. Shim, K. Zheng, G. Liu (Eds.), Web Technologies and Applications: 18th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2016, Suzhou, China, September 23-25, 2016. Proceedings, Part I, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 41–52.

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 Heliyon.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Meet Five Of The UK’s Most Poisonous Plants, IFLScience. (2014). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/meet-five-uk-s-most-poisonous-plants/ (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, Land Management Systems: Information on BLM’s Automated Land and Mineral Record System Release 2 Project, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

W.T. Schellhous, Factors and Interactions Contributing to the Risk of Fire following Earthquake for Urban Southern California, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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]

T. Cowen, The Technological Fix to Inequality, New York Times. (2014) BU7.

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	Heliyon
Abbreviation	Heliyon
ISSN (print)	2405-8440
Scope

Research and Writing Guides