How to format your references using the NRL Advances citation style

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

Knott G (2015) Neurodegeneration: Cold shock protects the brain. Nature 518:177–178

A journal article with 2 authors

Gao K-Q, Shubin NH (2003) Earliest known crown-group salamanders. Nature 422:424–428

A journal article with 3 authors

Janjić V, Sharan R, Pržulj N (2014) Modelling the yeast interactome. Sci Rep 4:4273

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Xu D, Lu H, Chu G, et al (2014) 500-year climate cycles stacking of recent centennial warming documented in an East Asian pollen record. Sci Rep 4:3611

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ward S (2014) TraderMind. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Golden RE (2013) Best Evidence Structural Interventions for HIV Prevention. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Marques de Sá JP (2007) Parametric Tests of Hypotheses. In: Marques de Sá JP (ed) Applied Statistics Using SPSS, STATISTICA, MATLAB and R. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 111–169

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 NRL Advances.

Blog post

Carpineti A (2016) Simulation Gives New Look Into Early Universe. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/numerical-simulation-gives-new-look-early-universe/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2004) Prekindergarten: Four Selected States Expanded Access by Relying on Schools and Existing Providers of Early Education and Care to Provide Services. 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

Meng W (2014) Synthesis and design of microwave wideband filters and components. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Burghardt LF (2005) One-of-a-Kind Gifts, All Made by Hand. New York Times 14LI17

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	NRL Advances
ISSN (online)	2197-375X
Scope