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]

W.B. Kristan, Neuroscience. A push-me pull-you neural design, Science 315 (2007) 339–340.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

U. Irion, D. St Johnston, bicoid RNA localization requires specific binding of an endosomal sorting complex, Nature 445 (2007) 554–558.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

V.N. Kim, N. Kataoka, G. Dreyfuss, Role of the nonsense-mediated decay factor hUpf3 in the splicing-dependent exon-exon junction complex, Science 293 (2001) 1832–1836.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

I.M. Longini Jr, A. Nizam, S. Xu, K. Ungchusak, W. Hanshaoworakul, D.A.T. Cummings, M.E. Halloran, Containing pandemic influenza at the source, Science 309 (2005) 1083–1087.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.J. Saliba, J.C. Corona, K.E. Johnson, Option Spread Strategies, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

D. Alpay, I. Gohberg, eds., The State Space Method Generalizations and Applications, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. da Silva Hounsell, L.K. Bittencourt, A.G. Silva, 3D Reconstruction from Planar Contours: Analysis of Heuristic Tiling Approaches, in: M.L. Gavrilova, C.J.K. Tan (Eds.), Transactions on Computational Science XXII, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014: pp. 95–114.

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]

J. O`Callaghan, Weird Pulsating Aurorae May Be Caused By Low-Energy Electrons, IFLScience (2015).

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, Federal Aviation Administration: Challenges Facing the Agency in Fiscal Year 2009 and Beyond, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2008.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

K. Williams, From Cribs to Crayons: A Study on the Use of Universal Curriculum and Assessment of Preschool Students and Teachers in the Classroom, Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana, 2016.

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. Wagner, Versatile Met Tries to Pull a Murphy, New York Times (2016) B13.

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