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.A.R. Dalvit, Quantum physics: shaking photons out of the vacuum, Nature 479 (2011) 303–304.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Malik, R.G. Roeder, Biochemistry. Have your PIC!, Science 342 (2013) 706–707.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Steinacher, F. Joos, T.F. Stocker, Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets, Nature 499 (2013) 197–201.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

H. Wardemann, S. Yurasov, A. Schaefer, J.W. Young, E. Meffre, M.C. Nussenzweig, Predominant autoantibody production by early human B cell precursors, Science 301 (2003) 1374–1377.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

P. Girling, Operational Risk Management, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

A. Gábor, A. Kő, eds., Corporate Knowledge Discovery and Organizational Learning: The Role, Importance, and Application of Semantic Business Process Management, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

W. Li, Y. Wu, M. Goh, A Continuous-Time Model for Multiple Yard Crane Scheduling with Last-Minute Job Arrivals, in: Y. Wu, M. Goh (Eds.), Planning and Scheduling for Maritime Container Yards: Supporting and Facilitating the Global Supply Network, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 53–83.

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, Poo-Powered Bus Breaks UK’s Land Speed Record, IFLScience (2015).

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 Equipment: FAA’s Use of a Suspended Contractor, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1986.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D. Durak, Improving forecasting accuracy of electric switch demand using artificial neural network and aggregate customer clustering techniques, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 2016.

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]

D. Bilefsky, Royal Retirement at 95 Halts Frenzied Rumors, New York Times (2017) A10.

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