How to format your references using the Information and Software Technology citation style

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

[1]

D. Lindley, Questions of direction, Nature. 410 (2001) 305.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

T. Hartung, C. Rovida, Chemical regulators have overreached, Nature. 460 (2009) 1080–1081.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

N.R. Phillips, M.L. Sprouse, R.K. Roby, Simultaneous quantification of mitochondrial DNA copy number and deletion ratio: a multiplex real-time PCR assay, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 3887.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Leibundgut, S. Jenni, C. Frick, N. Ban, Structural basis for substrate delivery by acyl carrier protein in the yeast fatty acid synthase, Science. 316 (2007) 288–290.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J.A. McGeough, The Engineering of Human Joint Replacements, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

D. Köhn, ed., Microfinance 3.0: Reconciling Sustainability with Social Outreach and Responsible Delivery, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

W. Fan, N. Bouguila, Nonparametric Localized Feature Selection via a Dirichlet Process Mixture of Generalized Dirichlet Distributions, in: T. Huang, Z. Zeng, C. Li, C.S. Leung (Eds.), Neural Information Processing: 19th International Conference, ICONIP 2012, Doha, Qatar, November 12-15, 2012, Proceedings, Part III, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012: pp. 25–33.

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 Information and Software Technology.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Microorganisms From Earth Could Survive On Mars, IFLScience. (2014).

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, ADP Planning: Allegations of Inadequate Procurements at the National Archives, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

C.D. Packer, School Referenda and Ohio Department of Education Typologies: An Investigation of the Outcomes of First Attempt School Operating Levies from 2002–2010, Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2013.

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]

J. Leland, Immersed in Scores, Concerts and Classes, New York Times. (2016) MB2.

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	Information and Software Technology
Abbreviation	Inf. Softw. Technol.
ISSN (print)	0950-5849
Scope	Computer Science Applications Information Systems Software