How to format your references using the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. 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]

J.W. Roberts, Biochemistry. RNA polymerase, a scrunching machine, Science 314 (2006) 1097–1098.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

D. Marchiori, M. Warglien, Predicting human interactive learning by regret-driven neural networks, Science 319 (2008) 1111–1113.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Yazdanbakhsh, P.G. Kremsner, R. van Ree, Allergy, parasites, and the hygiene hypothesis, Science 296 (2002) 490–494.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L. Adrian, U. Szewzyk, J. Wecke, H. Görisch, Bacterial dehalorespiration with chlorinated benzenes, Nature 408 (2000) 580–583.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. French, C. Szepesvári, E. Rogers, Performance of Nonlinear Approximate Adaptive Controllers, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

R. Fuller, X.D. Koutsoukos, eds., Mobile Entity Localization and Tracking in GPS-less Environnments: Second International Workshop, MELT 2009, Orlando, FL, USA, September 30, 2009. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

N.J. AlFardan, K.G. Paterson, An Analysis of DepenDNS, in: M. Burmester, G. Tsudik, S. Magliveras, I. Ilić (Eds.), Information Security: 13th International Conference, ISC 2010, Boca Raton, FL, USA, October 25-28, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011: pp. 31–38.

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 Theory, Series A.

Blog post

[1]

K. Hamilton, The Real Reason The EpiPen And Other Off-Patents Are So Expensive, IFLScience (2016).

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, Aviation Safety: Commuter Airports Should Participate in the Airport Certification Program, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1987.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

E.C. Dobson, Elizabeth C. Dobson Consulting and Design: A business plan for aging-in-place resources, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 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]

J. Ortved, Stylish Like a Fox, And Back in the City, New York Times (2017) D3.

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	Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A
Abbreviation	J. Comb. Theory Ser. A.
ISSN (print)	0097-3165
Scope	Computational Theory and Mathematics Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics Theoretical Computer Science