How to format your references using the IET Communications citation style

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

Bromm, V.: ‘Chemistry. To cool or not to cool’Science, 2010, 329, (5987), pp. 45–46.

A journal article with 2 authors

Chen, Z.-H., Schaap, P.: ‘The prokaryote messenger c-di-GMP triggers stalk cell differentiation in Dictyostelium’Nature, 2012, 488, (7413), pp. 680–683.

A journal article with 3 authors

Connors, M., Wiegert, P., Veillet, C.: ‘Earth’s Trojan asteroid’Nature, 2011, 475, (7357), pp. 481–483.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Neff, J.C., Townsend, A.R., Gleixner, G., Lehman, S.J., Turnbull, J., Bowman, W.D.: ‘Variable effects of nitrogen additions on the stability and turnover of soil carbon’Nature, 2002, 419, (6910), pp. 915–917.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stafford, F.: ‘Reading Romantic Poetry’ (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012)

An edited book

Pinkerton, K.E., Rom, W.N. (Eds.): ‘Global Climate Change and Public Health’ (Springer, 2014)

A chapter in an edited book

Johnson, R.G.: ‘There and Back Again – Andrew Booth, a British Computer Pioneer, and his Interactions with US and Other Contemporaries’, in Tatnall, A., Leslie, C. (Eds.): ‘International Communities of Invention and Innovation: IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on the History of Computing, HC 2016, Brooklyn, NY, USA, May 25-29, 2016, Revised Selected Papers’ (Springer International Publishing, 2016), pp. 58–70

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 IET Communications.

Blog post

Carpineti, A.: ‘Mars Might Have Had A Dense Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere’, https://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-might-have-had-a-dense-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere/, accessed October 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: ‘Highway Trust Fund: DOT Has Opportunities to Improve Tracking and Reporting of Highway Spending’ (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2014)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Batistick, S.A.: ‘Reclaiming One’s Gold: Imagining the Inner Child Through the Art of Therapeutic Fairy Tale Writing’. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2015

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

Vecsey, G.: ‘Pujols Won’t Find Unconditional Love Anywhere Else’New York Times, 2011, p. B17.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [2, 4].
This sentence cites four references [2, 4, 6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	IET Communications
Abbreviation	IET Commun.
ISSN (print)	1751-8628
Scope	Computer Science Applications Electrical and Electronic Engineering