How to format your references using the Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering. 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

Stewart W (2007) Applied physics. The power to set you free. Science 317:55–56

A journal article with 2 authors

Wang H, Glorius F (2012) Chemistry. Lending handedness to the cyclopentadienyl ligand. Science 338:479–480

A journal article with 3 authors

Gambetta MC, Oktaba K, Müller J (2009) Essential role of the glycosyltransferase sxc/Ogt in polycomb repression. Science 325:93–96

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Smith DL, Dushoff J, Snow RW, Hay SI (2005) The entomological inoculation rate and Plasmodium falciparum infection in African children. Nature 438:492–495

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Retherford RD, Choe MK (1993) Statistical Models for Causal Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Tremmel J (2010) A Young Generation Under Pressure?: The Financial Situation and the “Rush Hour” of the Cohorts 1970–1985 in a Generational Comparison. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Hogg T, Fattal DA, Chen K-Y, Guha S (2010) Economic Applications of Quantum Information Processing. In: Basu B, Chakravarty SR, Chakrabarti BK, Gangopadhyay K (eds) Econophysics and Economics of Games, Social Choices and Quantitative Techniques. Springer, Milano, pp 32–43

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 Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering.

Blog post

Hale T (2017) $2.5 Million Worth Of Rare Scientific Books Stolen In “Mission: Impossible-Style Heist.” In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1980) Triennial Assessment of the Tennessee Valley Authority--Fiscal Years 1977-1979. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ishutov S (2013) Tectonic characterization of the THUMS-Huntington Beach fault, offshore southern California. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

McKINLEY JC Jr (2017) Top State Court Deals Facebook a Setback. New York Times A19

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	Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering
Abbreviation	Innov. Syst. Softw. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1614-5046
ISSN (online)	1614-5054
Scope	Software