How to format your references using the International Journal of Legal Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Legal Medicine. 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

Petherick A (2010) Campaigning for Chagas disease. Nature 465:S21-2

A journal article with 2 authors

Martin P, Parkhurst SM (2003) Development. May the force be with you. Science 300:63–65

A journal article with 3 authors

Wang Z, Pakoulev A, Dlott DD (2002) Watching vibrational energy transfer in liquids with atomic spatial resolution. Science 296:2201–2203

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Crone B, Dodabalapur A, Lin YY, et al (2000) Large-scale complementary integrated circuits based on organic transistors. Nature 403:521–523

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Anderson D (2007) TKO Sales! John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Cleland I, Guerrero L, Bravo J (2015) Ambient Assisted Living. ICT-based Solutions in Real Life Situations: 7th International Work-Conference, IWAAL 2015, Puerto Varas, Chile, December 1-4, 2015, Proceedings, 1st ed. 2015. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Martín-Hervás C (2015) Imaging of the Hemophilic Joints. In: Rodríguez-Merchán EC (ed) Joint Surgery in the Adult Patient with Hemophilia. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 29–36

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 International Journal of Legal Medicine.

Blog post

Andrew E (2016) The Life-Changing Love Of One Of The 20th Century’s Greatest Physicists. 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 (2011) TANF and Child Welfare Programs: Increased Data Sharing Could Improve Access to Benefits and Services. 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

Escamilla D (2012) How performance following the implementation of a new structure affects employee engagement. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University

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

Blinder A, Philipps D (2017) Marine Crash Victims: Young Fathers, a Humming Sergeant, a Proud Texan. New York Times A15

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	International Journal of Legal Medicine
Abbreviation	Int. J. Legal Med.
ISSN (print)	0937-9827
ISSN (online)	1437-1596
Scope	Pathology and Forensic Medicine