How to format your references using the Journal of Symbolic Computation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Symbolic Computation. 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	Download the output style file
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

Robinson, N.J., 2011. Structural biology: a platform for copper pumps. Nature 475, 41–42.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bininda-Emonds, O.R.P., Purvis, A., 2012. Comment on “Impacts of the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution and KPg extinction on mammal diversification.” Science 337, 34; author reply 34.

A journal article with 3 authors

Skipper, M., Weiss, U., Gray, N., 2010. Plasticity. Nature 465, 703.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Clark, P.U., Dyke, A.S., Shakun, J.D., Carlson, A.E., Clark, J., Wohlfarth, B., Mitrovica, J.X., Hostetler, S.W., McCabe, A.M., 2009. The Last Glacial Maximum. Science 325, 710–714.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Storey, I.C., Allan, A., 2008. A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Winter, A., 2011. Health Information Systems: Architectures and Strategies, Second Edition. ed, Health Informatics. Springer, London.

A chapter in an edited book

Williams, M.A.J., Talbot, M.R., 2009. Late Quaternary Environments in the Nile Basin, in: Dumont, H.J. (Ed.), The Nile: Origin, Environments, Limnology and Human Use, Monographiae Biologicae. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 61–72.

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 Symbolic Computation.

Blog post

Davis, J., 2016. Why Antarctic Sea Ice Is Growing, While Arctic Sea Ice Is Melting [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2007. Performance and Accountability: Transportation Challenges Facing Congress and the Department of Transportation (No. GAO-07-545T). 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

Kantar, L., 2010. Clinical judgment among new nursing graduates: A multiple-case study (Doctoral dissertation). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Burghardt, L.F., 2006. An Animal Sanctuary Is Under Pressure to Move. New York Times 14WC5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Robinson, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Bininda-Emonds and Purvis, 2012; Robinson, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Bininda-Emonds and Purvis, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Clark et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Symbolic Computation
Abbreviation	J. Symb. Comput.
ISSN (print)	0747-7171
Scope	Algebra and Number Theory Computational Mathematics

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