How to format your references using the Interface Focus citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Interface Focus. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Fukatsu T. 2010 Evolution. A fungal past to insect color. Science 328, 574–575.

A journal article with 2 authors

Costello EK, Relman DA. 2014 Population health: immaturity in the gut microbial community. Nature 510, 344–345.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wong KM, Suchard MA, Huelsenbeck JP. 2008 Alignment uncertainty and genomic analysis. Science 319, 473–476.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Dai Y, Wang H, Yang T, Ren W, Zhang Z. 2014 Flower-like dynamics of coupled Skyrmions with dual resonant modes by a single-frequency microwave magnetic field. Sci. Rep. 4, 6153.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mitra A. 2008 Fundamentals of Quality Control and Improvement. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Matsuoka Y, Yoshida M, editors. 2014 Challenges for Human Security Engineering. Tokyo: Springer Japan.

A chapter in an edited book

Ellerton NF, Clements MA. 2014 With a Tinge of Green: Mary Walters’ Cyphering Book, 1820. In Abraham Lincoln’s Cyphering Book and Ten other Extraordinary Cyphering Books (ed MA (ken) Clements), pp. 97–121. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Interface Focus.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2015 First Close-Up Photograph Of Pluto’s Surface Released. IFLScience.

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. 1981 Implementing a Data Handling Policy for Space Science Flight Investigations.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Crozier CF. 2012 A qualitative study of teacher job satisfaction in an evolutionary and mandated change environment. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Crow K. 2001 Writers Are Halted Mid-Sentence as a Y Cancels Classes. New York Times, 13 May. , 147.

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	Interface Focus
Abbreviation	Interface Focus
ISSN (print)	2042-8898
ISSN (online)	2042-8901
Scope	Biochemistry Biophysics Biotechnology Bioengineering Biomedical Engineering Biomaterials