How to format your references using the Legal Medicine citation style

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

[1]

D.K.A. Barnes, Biodiversity: invasions by marine life on plastic debris, Nature. 416 (2002) 808–809.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A.W. Rutherford, A. Boussac, Biochemistry. Water photolysis in biology, Science. 303 (2004) 1782–1784.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

N.J.C. Ingle, M.R. Beasley, T.H. Geballe, Superconductivity in a spin-ladder cuprate, Science. 295 (2002) 1967.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D. Nykypanchuk, M.M. Maye, D. van der Lelie, O. Gang, DNA-guided crystallization of colloidal nanoparticles, Nature. 451 (2008) 549–552.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. Raczynski, Modeling and Simulation, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, England, 2006.

An edited book

[1]

P. Cash, T. Stanković, M. Štorga, eds., Experimental Design Research: Approaches, Perspectives, Applications, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Veiga, Food Defence and Security: The New Reality, in: H. Alpas, S.M. Berkowicz, I. Ermakova (Eds.), Environmental Security and Ecoterrorism, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011: pp. 39–54.

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 Legal Medicine.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, More Hints From CERN On Why The Universe Is Made Of Matter, IFLScience. (2017).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Improving Social Security Administration Procedures for Acquiring ADP and Telecommunications Resources, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1980.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. Payan Venegas, Factors associated with the lack of a regular health care provider for Latinos: Consequences and reasons, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2012.

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

[1]

A. Barnard, H. Saad, B. Hubbard, Thousands of Residents Still Trapped in Aleppo as Evacuations Break Down, New York Times. (2016) A9.

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	Legal Medicine
Abbreviation	Leg. Med. (Tokyo)
ISSN (print)	1344-6223
Scope	Pathology and Forensic Medicine Issues, ethics and legal aspects