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

Gewin, V. Groundbreaking Research. Nature 2002, 420, 4–6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gariano, R.F.; Gardner, T.W. Retinal Angiogenesis in Development and Disease. Nature 2005, 438, 960–966.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rockman, H.A.; Koch, W.J.; Lefkowitz, R.J. Seven-Transmembrane-Spanning Receptors and Heart Function. Nature 2002, 415, 206–212.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wang, Y.; Maharana, S.; Wang, M.D.; Shivashankar, G.V. Super-Resolution Microscopy Reveals Decondensed Chromatin Structure at Transcription Sites. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 4477.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dorsey, J.R. Y-Size Your Business; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2009; ISBN 9781118271803.

An edited book

Constituents of Modern System-Safety Thinking: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, Southampton, UK, 8–10 February 2005; Redmill, F., Anderson, T., Eds.; Springer: London, 2005; ISBN 9781852339524.

A chapter in an edited book

Pólya, G.; Tarjan, R.E.; Woods, D.R. Stirling Numbers. In Notes on Introductory Combinatorics; Tarjan, R.E., Woods, D.R., Eds.; Birkhäuser: Boston, MA, 2010; pp. 41–54 ISBN 9780817649548.

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

Andrew, E. NASA Hubble Telescope Sees A Storm In Lagoon Nebula Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-hubble-telescope-sees-storm-lagoon-nebula/ (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 Telecommunications: Charges for Itemized Cellular Telephone Bills; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1993;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Gimbel, S.I. Imaging Frontal and Medial Temporal Lobe Interaction during Memory Retrieval and Disentangling the Effects of the Default Network. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego: La Jolla, CA, 2010.

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

Stewart, J.B. More College Rankings, More Confusing Results. New York Times 2016, B1.

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