How to format your references using the Laws citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Laws. 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

Christianson, D.W. Chemistry. Roots of Biosynthetic Diversity. Science 2007, 316, 60–61.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rauschecker, J.P.; Shannon, R.V. Sending Sound to the Brain. Science 2002, 295, 1025–1029.

A journal article with 3 authors

Howat, I.M.; Joughin, I.; Scambos, T.A. Rapid Changes in Ice Discharge from Greenland Outlet Glaciers. Science 2007, 315, 1559–1561.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

von Mering, C.; Krause, R.; Snel, B.; Cornell, M.; Oliver, S.G.; Fields, S.; Bork, P. Comparative Assessment of Large-Scale Data Sets of Protein-Protein Interactions. Nature 2002, 417, 399–403.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Richards, T. Investing Psychology; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2014; ISBN 9781118779422.

An edited book

Buchmann, J.A. Introduction to Public Key Infrastructures; Karatsiolis, E., Wiesmaier, A., Eds.; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013; ISBN 9783642406560.

A chapter in an edited book

Afonso, A. The Domestic Regulation of Transnational Labour Markets: EU Enlargement and the Politics of Labour Migration in Switzerland and Ireland. In The Transnationalization of Economies, States, and Civil Societies: New Challenges for Governance in Europe; Bruszt, L., Holzhacker, R., Eds.; Springer US: New York, NY, 2009; pp. 83–106 ISBN 9780387893389.

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 Laws.

Blog post

Hale, T. India Has Planted Nearly 50 Million Trees In 24 Hours (accessed on 30 October 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 Telephone Communications: Issues Affecting Rural Telephone Service; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1987;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hufnagel, D. Search for the Cabibbo-Supressed D+ Meson Decays D+ → Π+π 0 and D+ → K+ Π0. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University: Columbus, OH, 2005.

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

Billard, M. Lessons From a Master Shopper. New York Times 2013, E14.

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	Laws
Abbreviation	Laws
ISSN (online)	2075-471X
Scope