How to format your references using the Machine Learning citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Machine Learning. 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.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
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
Gregory, R. (2004). The blind leading the sighted. Nature, 430(7002), 836.
A journal article with 2 authors
Hsieh, H. H., & Jewitt, D. (2006). A population of comets in the main asteroid belt. Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5773), 561–563.
A journal article with 3 authors
Tang, C., Iwahara, J., & Clore, G. M. (2006). Visualization of transient encounter complexes in protein-protein association. Nature, 444(7117), 383–386.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Sonane, M., Goyal, R., Chowdhuri, D. K., Ram, K. R., & Gupta, K. C. (2013). Enhanced efficiency of P-element mediated transgenesis in Drosophila: Microinjection of DNA complexed with nanomaterial. Scientific reports, 3, 3408.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Paul, S. (2010). Digital Video Distribution in Broadband, Television, Mobile and Converged Networks. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Narlikar, A. V. (Ed.). (2005). Frontiers in Superconducting Materials. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Anuradha, A., Lakshmi Kalpana, V., Kirmani, N., & Rao, P. J. (2016). CYP Polymorphism and Its Association with Tobacco Usage and Susceptibility to Head and Neck Cancer. In S. Avadhanam, G. Jyothsna, & A. Kashyap (Eds.), Next Generation DNA Led Technologies (pp. 35–48). Singapore: Springer.

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 Machine Learning.

Blog post
Hale, T. (2016, September 13). “Smart Sex Toy” Company Accused Of Collecting Intimate Data. IFLScience. IFLScience. Accessed 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. (1973). Protest Alleging Agency Refused To Consider Bid (No. B-178984). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Wrobleski, M. M. (2010). The challenge of teen nutrition: An ecological view of socio-cognitive influences on urban, African-American adolescent diet quality (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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
Paulson, M. (2017, August 9). Denver Weather? ‘Frozen.’ New York Times, p. AR1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gregory 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Gregory 2004; Hsieh and Jewitt 2006).

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

  • Two authors: (Hsieh and Jewitt 2006)
  • Three or more authors: (Sonane et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal titleMachine Learning
AbbreviationMach. Learn.
ISSN (print)0885-6125
ISSN (online)1573-0565
ScopeArtificial Intelligence
Software

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