How to format your references using the IFAC Journal of Systems and Control citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IFAC Journal of Systems and Control. 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

Knapp, S. (2013). Evolution. What, where, and when? Science (New York, N.Y.), 341(6151), 1182–1184.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fraser, P. J., & Shelmerdine, R. L. (2002). Dogfish hair cells sense hydrostatic pressure. Nature, 415(6871), 495–496.

A journal article with 3 authors

Munday, J. N., Capasso, F., & Parsegian, V. A. (2009). Measured long-range repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz forces. Nature, 457(7226), 170–173.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Zhu, F., Gujar, H., Gordon, J. R., Haynes, K. F., Potter, M. F., & Palli, S. R. (2013). Bed bugs evolved unique adaptive strategy to resist pyrethroid insecticides. Scientific Reports, 3, 1456.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hermans, J., & Lentz, B. (2013). Equilibria and Kinetics of Biological Macromolecules. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Mizio, R. D., & Scaglione, M. (Eds.). (2007). Ileo meccanico dell’intestino tenue: Aspetti TC e correlazioni eco-radiografiche. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Lavelli, A. (2013). An Ensemble Model for the EVALITA 2011 Dependency Parsing Task. In B. Magnini, F. Cutugno, M. Falcone, & E. Pianta (Eds.), Evaluation of Natural Language and Speech Tools for Italian: International Workshop, EVALITA 2011, Rome, January 24-25, 2012, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 30–36). Springer.

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 IFAC Journal of Systems and Control.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, August 11). Droplet Levitates On Electric Blue Plasma. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (1986). Guaranteed Student Loans: Guidelines for Reducing Guaranty Agency Reserves (HRD-86-129BR). 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

Roche, W. A. (2006). The Structure and Grounding of Epistemic Justification [Doctoral dissertation]. Ohio 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

Callahan, K. (2011, August 15). Quotation Of The Day. New York Times, A2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Knapp, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Fraser & Shelmerdine, 2002; Knapp, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Fraser & Shelmerdine, 2002)
Three authors: (Munday et al., 2009)
6 or more authors: (Zhu et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	IFAC Journal of Systems and Control
ISSN (print)	2468-6018
Scope