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]

B.J. Dickson, Molecular mechanisms of axon guidance, Science 298 (2002) 1959–1964.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

E.M. Hammond, A.J. Giaccia, Antiangiogenic therapy and p53, Science 297 (2002) 471; discussion 471.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

P.J. Wagner, M.A. Kosnik, S. Lidgard, Abundance distributions imply elevated complexity of post-Paleozoic marine ecosystems, Science 314 (2006) 1289–1292.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J. Garvin, R. Buick, A.D. Anbar, G.L. Arnold, A.J. Kaufman, Isotopic evidence for an aerobic nitrogen cycle in the latest Archean, Science 323 (2009) 1045–1048.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Y. Bai, Practical Database Programming with Visual C#.NET, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

B.-Y. Cao, ed., Fuzzy Information and Engineering: Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Fuzzy Information and Engineering (ICFIE), Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

C. Jones, X. Jia, Using a Domain Specific Language for Lightweight Model-Driven Development, in: L.A. Maciaszek, J. Filipe (Eds.), Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering: 9th International Conference, ENASE 2014, Lisbon, Portugal, April 28-30, 2014. Revised Selected Papers, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 46–62.

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]

S. Luntz, High School Students Make Martin Shkreli’s 5,000% Price-Hike Drug For Just $2, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/high-school-students-make-martin-shkrelis-5000-pricehike-drug-for-just-2/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, President’s Sixth Special Message for Fiscal Year 1985, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1985.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J.E. Augeri, Supportive Services for Homeless Veteran Women: Policy Implementation and Discretionary Practices of Those at the Front-Lines of Public Service, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 2015.

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]

J. Otis, Relying on Strict Regimen to Keep Addiction at Bay, New York Times (2016) A20.

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