How to format your references using the NIST Technical Publications - Journal of Research of NIST citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for NIST Technical Publications - Journal of Research of NIST. 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

[1]

Macilwain C (2013) Sharing information is preferable to patenting. Nature 498(7454):273.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Laver G, Garman E (2001) Virology. The origin and control of pandemic influenza. Science (New York, NY) 293(5536):1776–1777.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Keimer B, Sackmann E, Withers PJ (2002) Neutron scattering. The case for neutron sources. Science (New York, NY) 298(5593):543.

A journal article with 100 or more authors

[1]

Cheng Y, Austin SC, Rocca B, Koller BH, Coffman TM, Grosser T, Lawson JA, FitzGerald GA (2002) Role of prostacyclin in the cardiovascular response to thromboxane A2. Science (New York, NY) 296(5567):539–541.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Vettese F (2015) The Essential Retirement Guide (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ).

An edited book

[1]

Sykes D, Tocci GC, Cavanaugh WJ eds. (2013) Sound & Vibration 2.0: Design Guidelines for Health Care Facilities (Springer, New York, NY).

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Makke KR, Thangakumar J, Suresh Reddy BV, Somaiah Y (2014) Enhancing Data Caching in Ad-hoc Networks Through Benefit-Based Technique. Proceedings of International Conference on Internet Computing and Information Communications: ICICIC Global 2012, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing., eds Sathiakumar S, Awasthi LK, Masillamani MR, Sridhar SS (Springer India, New Delhi), pp 43–52.

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 NIST Technical Publications - Journal of Research of NIST.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E (2014) New Mineral Discovered With A Unique Composition. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/new-mineral-discovered-unique-composition/

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 (1981) Federal Agencies’ Maintenance of Computer Programs: Expensive and Undermanaged. (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC), AFMD-81-25.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Mihalcin D (2008) A comparison of the Children’s Functional Assessment Rating Scale and the Child Behavior Checklist used in a wraparound program. Doctoral dissertation (Capella University, Minneapolis, MN).

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]

Kishkovsky S, Herszenhorn DM (2012) Punk Band’s Moscow Trial Offers Platform for Orthodox Protesters. New York Times:A11.

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	NIST Technical Publications - Journal of Research of NIST
ISSN (print)	1044-677X
ISSN (online)	2165-7254
Scope