How to format your references using the Information Systems Frontiers citation style

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

Bergman, L. (2005). Damned if you don’t. Nature, 435(7044), 1002.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sakaba, T., & Neher, E. (2003). Direct modulation of synaptic vesicle priming by GABA(B) receptor activation at a glutamatergic synapse. Nature, 424(6950), 775–778.

A journal article with 3 authors

Savrasov, S. Y., Kotliar, G., & Abrahams, E. (2001). Correlated electrons in delta-plutonium within a dynamical mean-field picture. Nature, 410(6830), 793–795.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

El Albani, A., Bengtson, S., Canfield, D. E., Bekker, A., Macchiarelli, R., Mazurier, A., et al. (2010). Large colonial organisms with coordinated growth in oxygenated environments 2.1 Gyr ago. Nature, 466(7302), 100–104.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Calloway, J. (2009). Becoming a Category of One. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Atweh, B., Graven, M., Secada, W., & Valero, P. (Eds.). (2011). Mapping Equity and Quality in Mathematics Education. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

A chapter in an edited book

Eemeren, F., Garssen, B., & Meuffels, B. (2009). The Confrontation Stage: The Freedom Rule. In B. Garssen & B. Meuffels (Eds.), Fallacies and Judgments of Reasonableness: Empirical Research Concerning the Pragma-Dialectical Discussion Rules (pp. 85–109). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Systems Frontiers.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2015, January 31). What Would Happen To Earth If All Humans Disappeared? IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/what-would-happen-if-humans-disappeared-earth/. Accessed 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. (1995). Land-Grant College Revenues (No. HEHS-96-10R). Washington, DC: 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

Jones, E. (2019). Leadership Practices in K-12 Public Schools for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students: A Qualitative Study (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Dominus, S. (2016, October 14). Trump’s Boasts Shake Women Out of Silence. New York Times, p. A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bergman 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Bergman 2005; Sakaba and Neher 2003).

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

Two authors: (Sakaba and Neher 2003)
Three or more authors: (El Albani et al. 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Information Systems Frontiers
Abbreviation	Inf. Syst. Front.
ISSN (print)	1387-3326
ISSN (online)	1572-9419
Scope	Computer Networks and Communications Information Systems Software Theoretical Computer Science