How to format your references using the International Journal of Nursing Studies citation style

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

Davis, B., 2011. Education. Mathematics teachers’ subtle, complex disciplinary knowledge. Science 332, 1506–1507.

A journal article with 2 authors

Knight, J.C., Russell, P.S.J., 2002. Applied optics. New ways to guide light. Science 296, 276–277.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sinclair, A.R.E., Mduma, S., Brashares, J.S., 2003. Patterns of predation in a diverse predator-prey system. Nature 425, 288–290.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Gu, Z., Kaul, M., Yan, B., Kridel, S.J., Cui, J., Strongin, A., Smith, J.W., Liddington, R.C., Lipton, S.A., 2002. S-nitrosylation of matrix metalloproteinases: signaling pathway to neuronal cell death. Science 297, 1186–1190.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vincoli, J.W., 2014. Basic Guide to System Safety. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Borutzky, W. (Ed.), 2011. Bond Graph Modelling of Engineering Systems: Theory, Applications and Software Support, 1st ed. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Karp, B., Durban, D., 2013. Elastodynamic End Effects in Structural Mechanics, in: Craster, R.V., Kaplunov, J. (Eds.), Dynamic Localization Phenomena in Elasticity, Acoustics and Electromagnetism, CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences. Springer, Vienna, pp. 115–179.

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 Nursing Studies.

Blog post

Andrew, D., 2016. Five Laws About The Dead That May Spook You [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/five-laws-about-the-dead-that-may-spook-you/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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. Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle: DOD Needs to Ensure New Acquisition Strategy is Based on Sufficient Information (No. GAO-11-641). 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

Kim, J.W., 2009. Perceptually motivated automatic dance motion generation for music (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

Qiu, L., 2017. Trump Claims Undue Credit On an Arsenal. New York Times A7.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Davis, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Davis, 2011; Knight and Russell, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Knight and Russell, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Gu et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	International Journal of Nursing Studies
Abbreviation	Int. J. Nurs. Stud.
ISSN (print)	0020-7489
Scope	General Nursing

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