How to format your references using the Journal of Laboratory Automation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA). 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

Gutmann, A. Ethics. The Bioethics Commission on Incidental Findings. Science 2013, 342, 1321–1323.

A journal article with 2 authors

Armbrust, E. V.; Palumbi, S. R. Marine Biology. Uncovering Hidden Worlds of Ocean Biodiversity. Science 2015, 348, 865–867.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mignot, T.; Merlie, J. P., Jr; Zusman, D. R. Regulated Pole-to-Pole Oscillations of a Bacterial Gliding Motility Protein. Science 2005, 310, 855–857.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Isles, A. R.; Baum, M. J.; Ma, D.; et al. Urinary Odour Preferences in Mice. Nature 2001, 409, 783–784.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wolf, R. A. Atmospheric Pressure Plasma for Surface Modification; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2012.

An edited book

Reasoning, Action and Interaction in AI Theories and Systems: Essays Dedicated to Luigia Carlucci Aiello; Stock, O.; Schaerf, M., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006; Vol. 4155.

A chapter in an edited book

Huang, Y.; Tan, T. Evolution of Feature Coding. In Feature Coding for Image Representation and Recognition; Tan, T., Ed.; SpringerBriefs in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014; pp. 27–35.

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 Laboratory Automation.

Blog post

Luntz, S. One Part Of The Brain Keeps Growing As An Adult https://www.iflscience.com/brain/one-part-of-the-brain-keeps-growing-as-an-adult/ (accessed Oct 30, 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. Aircraft Maintenance: Air Force Transferred and Eliminated Tasks to Address Funding Shortfalls; NSIAD-90-114; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1990.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Brothers, J. Nonparametric Regression Using Wavelet Transformations and Noise Reduction in Audio Signals. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2009.

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. St. John’s Takes an Opener, With No Fight From UConn. New York Times, 2010, B13.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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 Laboratory Automation
ISSN (print)	2211-0682
ISSN (online)	1540-2452
Scope