How to format your references using the Patient Education and Counseling citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Patient Education and Counseling. 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]

S.M. Colman, Paleoclimate. A fresh look at glacial floods, Science. 296 (2002) 1251–1252.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

K. Takehara-Nishiuchi, B.L. McNaughton, Spontaneous changes of neocortical code for associative memory during consolidation, Science. 322 (2008) 960–963.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.S. Takahashi, K. Shimomura, V. Kumar, Searching for genes underlying behavior: lessons from circadian rhythms, Science. 322 (2008) 909–912.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. Angers, T. Li, X. Yi, M.J. MacCoss, R.T. Moon, N. Zheng, Molecular architecture and assembly of the DDB1-CUL4A ubiquitin ligase machinery, Nature. 443 (2006) 590–593.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G.S. Matte, Perfusion for Congenital Heart Surgery, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2015.

An edited book

[1]

S. Akella, N.M. Amato, W.H. Huang, B. Mishra, eds., Algorithmic Foundation of Robotics VII: Selected Contributions of the Seventh International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. Bakker, Analytic Modeling of Transient Multilayer Flow, in: P.K. Mishra, K.L. Kuhlman (Eds.), Advances in Hydrogeology, Springer, New York, NY, 2013: pp. 95–114.

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 Patient Education and Counseling.

Blog post

[1]

S. Luntz, New Paper Solves Black Hole Paradox, Suggests They Don’t Erase Information After All, IFLScience. (2015).

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, Need for Improved Coordination of Federally Assisted Student Aid Programs in Institutions of Higher Education, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1972.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

K. Williams, Riot Bias: A Textual Analysis of Pussy Riot’s Coverage in Russian and American Media, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 2014.

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]

B. Brantley, We’re All Doomed. It Says So in the Script, New York Times. (2017) C4.

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	Patient Education and Counseling
Abbreviation	Patient Educ. Couns.
ISSN (print)	0738-3991
Scope	General Medicine