How to format your references using the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Combinatorial Optimization. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Collins JJ (2009) Journal club. A bioengineer gets schooled by Escherichia coli. Nature 460:155

A journal article with 2 authors

Kruglyak L, Stern DL (2007) Evolution. An embarrassment of switches. Science 317:758–759

A journal article with 3 authors

Lee K, Zhang Y, Lee SE (2008) Saccharomyces cerevisiae ATM orthologue suppresses break-induced chromosome translocations. Nature 454:543–546

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhou L, Mitra R, Atkinson PW, et al (2004) Transposition of hAT elements links transposable elements and V(D)J recombination. Nature 432:995–1001

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Krichen S, Chaouachi J (2014) Graph-Related Optimization and Decision Support Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Riggirozzi P, Tussie D (eds) (2012) The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism: The Case of Latin America. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Rehm G, Uszkoreit H (2012) META-NET. In: Rehm G, Uszkoreit H (eds) The Polish Language in the Digital Age. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 35–35

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 Journal of Combinatorial Optimization.

Blog post

Hale T (2015) Creepy Swarm Of Baby Crabs Crawl Over Man’s Hand. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/creepy-swarm-baby-crabs-crawl-over-mans-hand/. 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 (1978) Controls Are Needed Over Indian Self-Determination Contracts, Grants, and Training and Technical Assistance Activities To Insure Required Services Are Provided to Indians. 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

Carlson L (2010) From Albéniz to Arbós: The orchestration of “Iberia.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

SOPHIA OKUN TRACY; Sophia Okun Tracy lives in New Rochelle (1987) TATTERED REMINDERS OF WORDS TO INSPIRE A CHILD. New York Times 11WC28

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Collins 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Kruglyak and Stern 2007; Collins 2009).

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

Two authors: (Kruglyak and Stern 2007)
Three or more authors: (Zhou et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Combinatorial Optimization
Abbreviation	J. Comb. Optim.
ISSN (print)	1382-6905
ISSN (online)	1573-2886
Scope	Computational Theory and Mathematics Computer Science Applications Applied Mathematics Control and Optimization Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics