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

Campbell G (2002) Distalization of the Drosophila leg by graded EGF-receptor activity. Nature 418:781–785

A journal article with 2 authors

Yan N, Chen X (2015) Sustainability: Don’t waste seafood waste. Nature 524:155–157

A journal article with 3 authors

Agrawal T, Schu P, Medigeshi GR (2013) Adaptor protein complexes-1 and 3 are involved at distinct stages of flavivirus life-cycle. Sci Rep 3:1813

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Mandal SM, Migliolo L, Silva ON, et al (2014) Controlling resistant bacteria with a novel class of β-lactamase inhibitor peptides: from rational design to in vivo analyses. Sci Rep 4:6015

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Michaud T (2017) Innovation, Between Science and Science Fiction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Gannon T, Fletcher M, Ball T (2005) Mack Scogin Merrill Elam: Knowlton Hall. Princeton Archit. Press, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Sorensen DC, Antoulas AC (2005) On Model Reduction of Structured Systems. In: Benner P, Sorensen DC, Mehrmann V (eds) Dimension Reduction of Large-Scale Systems: Proceedings of a Workshop held in Oberwolfach, Germany, October 19–25, 2003. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 117–130

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

Luntz S (2015) How Dams Are Poisoning The Arctic. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/how-big-dams-are-poisoning-arctic-methylmercury/. 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 (1990) Highway Financing: Participating States Benefit Under Toll Facilities Pilot Program. 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

Tripputi MT (2009) Use of mediation in designing clinical trials with two primary endpoints. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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

Koblin J (2017) Two Asian-American Actors in ‘Hawaii Five-0’ Depart. New York Times B5

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