How to format your references using the IT Professional citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IT Professional. 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

[1]

C. Seife, “INFORMATION THEORY: ‘Ultimate PC’ Would Be a Hot Little Number,” Science, vol. 289, no. 5484, pp. 1447a–8a, Sep. 2000.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J. Sachs and P. Malaney, “The economic and social burden of malaria,” Nature, vol. 415, no. 6872, pp. 680–685, Feb. 2002.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Z.-Z. Li, F.-C. Zhang, and Q.-H. Wang, “Majorana modes in a topological insulator/s-wave superconductor heterostructure,” Sci. Rep., vol. 4, p. 6363, Sep. 2014.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Caiazzo et al., “Direct generation of functional dopaminergic neurons from mouse and human fibroblasts,” Nature, vol. 476, no. 7359, pp. 224–227, Jul. 2011.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. K. Adhikari, Variational Principles and the Numerical Solution of Scattering Problems. Weinheim, FRG: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

D. F. Charron, Ed., La Recherche Écosanté en pratique: Applications novatrices d’une approche écosystémique de la santé, vol. 2. in Insight and Innovation in International Development, vol. 2. New York, NY: Springer, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

P. A. McFarlane, “Intensive Hemodialysis in the Clinic and At Home,” in Modelling and Control of Dialysis Systems: Volume 1: Modeling Techniques of Hemodialysis Systems, A. T. Azar, Ed., in Studies in Computational Intelligence. , Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013, pp. 167–233.

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 IT Professional.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, “Supersymmetry Dealt Another Blow By LHC,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/supersymmetry-dealt-another-blow-lhc/

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, “Changes Needed in Administering Relief to Industries Hurt by Overseas Competition,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, ID-81-42, Aug. 1981.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J. Bradford, “Commutative endomorphism rings of simple abelian varieties over finite fields,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD, 2012.

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

[1]

B. Brantley, “Time Takes the Sharp Edges Off a Femme Fatale in a David Hare Revival,” New York Times, p. C6, Oct. 24, 2016.

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], [2], [3], [4].

About the journal

Full journal title	IT Professional
Abbreviation	IT Prof.
ISSN (print)	1520-9202
Scope	Computer Science Applications Hardware and Architecture Software