How to format your references using the Lingua citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Errico, A., 2015. Judge by actions, not words. Nature 522, 393.
A journal article with 2 authors
Smaglik, P., Smith, A., 2002. A route to flexible working. Nature 415, 4–6.
A journal article with 3 authors
Advani, M.J., Rajagopalan, M., Reddy, P.H., 2014. Calmodulin-like protein from M. tuberculosis H37Rv is required during infection. Sci. Rep. 4, 6861.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Akopyants, N.S., Kimblin, N., Secundino, N., Patrick, R., Peters, N., Lawyer, P., Dobson, D.E., Beverley, S.M., Sacks, D.L., 2009. Demonstration of genetic exchange during cyclical development of Leishmania in the sand fly vector. Science 324, 265–268.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Bajpai, P., 2010. Environmentally Friendly Production of Pulp and Paper. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Italiano, G.F., Pighizzini, G., Sannella, D.T. (Eds.), 2015. Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2015: 40th International Symposium, MFCS 2015, Milan, Italy, August 24-28, 2015, Proceedings, Part II, 1st ed. 2015. ed, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Fournais, S., Helffer, B., 2009. Constant Field Models in Dimension 2: Noncompact Case, in: Helffer, B. (Ed.), Spectral Methods in Surface Superconductivity. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA, pp. 45–50.

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 Lingua.

Blog post
Andrew, D., 2017. Why Did Humans Evolve Big Penises But Small Testicles? [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, 2013. Building Partner Capacity: Actions Needed to Strengthen DOD Efforts to Assess the Performance of the Regional Centers for Security Studies (No. GAO-13-606). 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
Chan, J.A., 2014. An in-home visitation program for Meals-on-Wheels recipients: A grant proposal (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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
Koblin, J., 2017. ‘Game of Thrones’ Spinoffs From HBO. New York Times C2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Errico, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Errico, 2015; Smaglik and Smith, 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Smaglik and Smith, 2002)
  • Three or more authors: (Akopyants et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal titleLingua
AbbreviationLingua
ISSN (print)0024-3841
ScopeLanguage and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language

Other styles