How to format your references using the Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development. 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

Groves JT (2006) Chemistry. Unveiling the membrane domains. Science 313:1901–1902

A journal article with 2 authors

Shohat S, Shifman S (2014) Bias towards large genes in autism. Nature 512:E1-2

A journal article with 3 authors

Tatano Y, Shimizu T, Tomioka H (2014) Unique macrophages different from M1/M2 macrophages inhibit T cell mitogenesis while upregulating Th17 polarization. Sci Rep 4:4146

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Du D-Y, Qin J-S, Sun Z, et al (2013) An unprecedented (3,4,24)-connected heteropolyoxozincate organic framework as heterogeneous crystalline Lewis acid catalyst for biodiesel production. Sci Rep 3:2616

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Walker C, Fincham B (2011) Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Britain. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Milutinović V (2015) Guide to DataFlow Supercomputing: Basic Concepts, Case Studies, and a Detailed Example. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Bagdanov AD, Del Bimbo A, Landucci L, Pernici F (2012) MNEMOSYNE: Enhancing the Museum Experience through Interactive Media and Visual Profiling. In: Grana C, Cucchiara R (eds) Multimedia for Cultural Heritage: First International Workshop, MM4CH 2011, Modena, Italy, May 3, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 39–50

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 Software Engineering Research and Development.

Blog post

Andrew D (2015) What’s The Fastest (Fictional) Spaceship In The Universe? 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 (1989) Student Athletes: Information on Their Academic Performance. 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

Young JL (2010) A community college’s loss of accreditation: A case study. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Novick SM (2015) Feast of Championships. New York Times LI10

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Groves 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Groves 2006; Shohat and Shifman 2014).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Shohat and Shifman 2014)
Three or more authors: (Du et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development
Abbreviation	J. Softw. Eng. Res. Dev.
ISSN (online)	2195-1721
Scope