How to format your references using the Pattern Recognition Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Pattern Recognition Letters. 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]

R. Jones, Biomarkers: casting the net wide, Nature. 466 (2010) S11-2.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J.T. Greenamyre, T.G. Hastings, Biomedicine. Parkinson’s--divergent causes, convergent mechanisms, Science. 304 (2004) 1120–1122.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M. Alimardani, S. Nishio, H. Ishiguro, Humanlike robot hands controlled by brain activity arouse illusion of ownership in operators, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 2396.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. Kubo, W.B. Durham, L.A. Stern, S.H. Kirby, Grain size-sensitive creep in ice II, Science. 311 (2006) 1267–1269.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

C. Lalanne, Mechanical Shock, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2014.

An edited book

[1]

S. Hsu, Y.-Y. Wu, eds., Education as Cultivation in Chinese Culture, Springer, Singapore, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

C. Bokemeyer, C. Seidel, Metastatic Germ Cell Cancer: The Intermediate-Prognosis Risk Category, in: S. Krege (Ed.), Diagnosis and Management of Testicular Cancer: The European Point of View, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 55–64.

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 Pattern Recognition Letters.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, Naked Penguin Gets A New Wetsuit For Winter, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/naked-penguin-gets-a-new-wetsuit-for-winter/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Transportation Issue Area Plan--Fiscal Years 1995-97, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R.L. Hannington, Power and display in the court music of Augustus the Strong: The influences affecting the composition of Johann David Heinichens’s sinfonias, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2011.

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]

J. Surico, Queens Woman Killed in Attack by Her Dog, New York Times. (2017) A25.

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	Pattern Recognition Letters
Abbreviation	Pattern Recognit. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0167-8655
Scope	Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Signal Processing Software

Research and Writing Guides