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

Gammon K (2014) Gene therapy: editorial control. Nature 515:S11-3

A journal article with 2 authors

Sfeir A, de Lange T (2012) Removal of shelterin reveals the telomere end-protection problem. Science 336:593–597

A journal article with 3 authors

Pertea M, Salzberg SL, Gardner MJ (2000) Finding genes in Plasmodium falciparum. Nature 404:34; discussion 34-5

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Huang Y-K, Chen S-C, Ho Y-H, et al (2014) Feature-rich magnetic quantization in sliding bilayer graphenes. Sci Rep 4:7509

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

The Family Firm Institute, Inc. (2013) Family Enterprise. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Lowery C, Walker A, Thomas C (eds) (2016) Un-Democratic Acts: New Departures for Dialogues in Society and Schools. SensePublishers, Rotterdam

A chapter in an edited book

Moulart R, Rotinat R (2016) Evaluation of the Penalized Least Squares Method for Strain Computation. In: Sciammarella C, Considine J, Gloeckner P (eds) Experimental and Applied Mechanics, Volume 4: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Conference on Experimental and Applied Mechanics. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 43–50

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

Andrews R (2016) El Niño Has Definitely Ended, But Climate Change Nightmares Are Here To Stay. 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 (2005) College Textbooks: Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases. 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

Hofmann TB (2008) Adductor and abductor spasmodic dysphonia: A comparison of quality of life issues for those receiving Botox treatment. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral 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

Walsh MW (2015) Senate Republicans Introduce Bill for Relief of Puerto Rico’s Financial Problems. New York Times B4

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gammon 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Sfeir and de Lange 2012; Gammon 2014).

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

Two authors: (Sfeir and de Lange 2012)
Three or more authors: (Huang et al. 2014)

About the journal

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