How to format your references using the Informatics citation style

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

Gould, P.L. Physics. Cold Molecules Beat the Shakes. Science 2008, 322, 203–204.

A journal article with 2 authors

Elderfield, H.; Ganssen, G. Past Temperature and Delta18O of Surface Ocean Waters Inferred from Foraminiferal Mg/Ca Ratios. Nature 2000, 405, 442–445.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fuller, P.M.; Lu, J.; Saper, C.B. Differential Rescue of Light- and Food-Entrainable Circadian Rhythms. Science 2008, 320, 1074–1077.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

He, W.; Huang, K.; Ning, N.; Ramanathan, K.; Li, G.; Jiang, Y.; Sze, J.; Shi, L.; Zhao, R.; Pei, J. Enabling an Integrated Rate-Temporal Learning Scheme on Memristor. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 4755.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Franssen, J.-M.; Real, P.V. Fire Design of Steel Structures; Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA: Weinheim, Germany, 2010; ISBN 9783433601570.

An edited book

Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems: 12th International Conference, FORMATS 2014, Florence, Italy, September 8-10, 2014. Proceedings; Legay, A., Bozga, M., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2014; Vol. 8711; ISBN 9783319105116.

A chapter in an edited book

Wang, W. FSK Modulation and Demodulation Analysis Based on Matlab. In Information and Business Intelligence: International Conference, IBI 2011, Chongqing, China, December 23-25, 2011. Proceedings, Part I; Qu, X., Yang, Y., Eds.; Communications in Computer and Information Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012; pp. 26–32 ISBN 9783642290831.

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 Informatics.

Blog post

Luntz, S. How Cobras Learned To Spit Venom Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-cobras-learned-to-spit-venom/ (accessed on 30 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 Award of Indian Health Professions Scholarships; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1999;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Heckman, K.A. Pedogenesis & Carbon Dynamics across a Lithosequence under Ponderosa Pine. Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona: Tucson, AZ, 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

Baker, A.L.; David Goodman, J. New York Police to Strictly Track the Use of Force. New York Times 2015, A1.

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	Informatics
Abbreviation	Informatics (MDPI)
ISSN (online)	2227-9709
Scope

Research and Writing Guides