How to format your references using the IET Software citation style

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

Zschokke, S.: ‘Palaeontology: spider-web silk from the Early Cretaceous’Nature, 2003, 424, (6949), pp. 636–637.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bonadonna, F., Nevitt, G.A.: ‘Partner-specific odor recognition in an Antarctic seabird’Science, 2004, 306, (5697), p. 835.

A journal article with 3 authors

Xia, K., Vanner, M.R., Twamley, J.: ‘An opto-magneto-mechanical quantum interface between distant superconducting qubits’Sci. Rep., 2014, 4, p. 5571.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Zhang, D., Zhang, G., Hayden, M.S., et al.: ‘A toll-like receptor that prevents infection by uropathogenic bacteria’Science, 2004, 303, (5663), pp. 1522–1526.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Peterson, R.L., Murtha, F.F.: ‘MarketPsych’ (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010)

An edited book

Fursey, G.: ‘Field Emission in Vacuum Microelectronics’ (Springer US, 2005)

A chapter in an edited book

Chiou, A., Wong, K.W.: ‘Auto-explanation System: Player Satisfaction in Strategy-Based Board Games’, in Nakatsu, R., Tosa, N., Naghdy, F., Wong, K.W., Codognet, P. (Eds.): ‘Cultural Computing: Second IFIP TC 14 Entertainment Computing Symposium, ECS 2010, Held as Part of WCC 2010, Brisbane, Australia, September 20-23, 2010. Proceedings’ (Springer, 2010), pp. 46–54

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 Software.

Blog post

Fang, J.: ‘Your Microbes Get Jetlag Too’, https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/jetlag-disrupts-your-gut-microbes-too/, 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: ‘Protest Against Rejection of Bid’ (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Douet, C.: ‘The influence of an overseas trip to France on high school students studying French, four years after graduation’. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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

Williams, J.: ‘Podcast Therapy’New York Times, 2017, p. BR4.

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 Software
Abbreviation	IET Softw.
ISSN (print)	1751-8806
Scope	Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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