How to format your references using the Journal of Robotic Surgery citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Robotic Surgery. 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

Hansen B (2000) A bright future for dark matter. Nature 403:30–31

A journal article with 2 authors

Stark J, Hardy K (2003) Mathematics. Chaos: useful at last? Science 301:1192–1193

A journal article with 3 authors

Lavine M, Szuromi P, Coontz R (2011) Materials for grid energy. Electricity now and when. Introduction. Science 334:921

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Cvetkovic A, Menon AL, Thorgersen MP, et al (2010) Microbial metalloproteomes are largely uncharacterized. Nature 466:779–782

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kim Y-H (2010) Sound Propagation. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Popkin JD (2008) The Legacies of Richard Popkin. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Darrigol O (2009) Stueckelberg’s Unitary Field Theory of 1936–1939. In: Lacki J, Ruegg H, Wanders G (eds) E.C.G. Stueckelberg, An Unconventional Figure of Twentieth Century Physics: Selected Scientific Papers with Commentaries. Birkhäuser, Basel, pp 53–72

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 Robotic Surgery.

Blog post

Fang J (2014) New Liquid Metal Battery Will Make Renewables Competitive. In: IFLScience. 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 (1997) Environmental Cleanup Costs: NASA Is Making Progress in Identifying Contamination, but More Effort Is Needed. 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

Simone PS (2012) A mixed methods study of culturally proficient practices in an elementary school. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University

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

Paulson M (2017) To Say Hello To Dolly, Say Bye to $1,009. New York Times C1

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 Robotic Surgery
Abbreviation	J. Robot. Surg.
ISSN (print)	1863-2483
ISSN (online)	1863-2491
Scope	Health Informatics Surgery