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]

P.B. Messersmith, Materials science. Holding on by a hard-shell thread, Science. 328 (2010) 180–181.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

W. Junge, N. Nelson, Structural biology. Nature’s rotary electromotors, Science. 308 (2005) 642–644.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

E.S. Levine, L. Blitz, C. Heiles, The spiral structure of the outer Milky Way in hydrogen, Science. 312 (2006) 1773–1777.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J.J. Freyd, F.W. Putnam, T.D. Lyon, K.A. Becker-Blease, R.E. Cheit, N.B. Siegel, K. Pezdek, Psychology. The science of child sexual abuse, Science. 308 (2005) 501.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G. Schwedt, Zuckersüße Chemie, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

C. Drebenstedt, R. Singhal, eds., Mine Planning and Equipment Selection: Proceedings of the 22nd MPES Conference, Dresden, Germany, 14th – 19th October 2013, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Cui, S.J. Stolfo, Symbiotes and defensive Mutualism: Moving Target Defense, in: S. Jajodia, A.K. Ghosh, V. Swarup, C. Wang, X.S. Wang (Eds.), Moving Target Defense: Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats, Springer, New York, NY, 2011: pp. 99–108.

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]

B. Taub, Here’s What Ötzi The Iceman Was Wearing When He Died, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/otzi-iceman-wearing-when-he-dies/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Examination of the Pricing of a Negotiated Fixed-Price Incentive Contract Awarded on a Noncompetitive Basis, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1977.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D.M. Jones, Educational paradigm shift: Emergence of the virtual classroom, Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, 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

[1]

L. Saslow, Police Say Mother Let Minors Drink Alcohol, New York Times. (2007) LI2.

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

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