How to format your references using the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research. 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

Buckingham S. Buying into the knowledge game. Nature. 428(6984), 775 (2004).

A journal article with 2 authors

Sauvageau G, Humphries RK. Medicine. The blood stem cell Holy Grail? Science. 329(5997), 1291–1292 (2010).

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang K, Zhang Y, Wang S. Enhancing thermoelectric properties of organic composites through hierarchical nanostructures. Sci. Rep. 3, 3448 (2013).

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Miller-Jensen K, Janes KA, Brugge JS, Lauffenburger DA. Common effector processing mediates cell-specific responses to stimuli. Nature. 448(7153), 604–608 (2007).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McBee J. Mastering Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 SP1. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

Czumaj A, Mehlhorn K, Pitts A, Wattenhofer R, editors. Automata, Languages, and Programming: 39th International Colloquium, ICALP 2012, Warwick, UK, July 9-13, 2012, Proceedings, Part II. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Aral A, Gupta V, Agarwal RP. q-Bernstein-Type Integral Operators. In: Applications of q-Calculus in Operator Theory. Gupta V, Agarwal RP (Eds.), Springer, New York, NY, 113–144 (2013).

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 Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Blog post

Andrew E. When Should You Take Antibiotics? [Internet]. IFLScience (2015). Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/when-should-you-take-antibiotics/.

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. Trainer Aircraft: Plans to Replace the Existing Fleet. 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

Brown ER. Comparison of instructional techniques of high school economics teachers in Georgia and Shenzhen, China. (2011).

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

Vecsey G. Rematch 45 Years In the Making. New York Times, B11 (2010).

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 Comparative Effectiveness Research
Abbreviation	J. Comp. Eff. Res.
ISSN (print)	2042-6305
ISSN (online)	2042-6313
Scope	Health Policy

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