How to format your references using the Patterns citation style

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

James, B. (2015). Astrophysics: Primordial stars brought to light. Nature 526, 46–47.

A journal article with 2 authors

Shizuka, D., and Lyon, B.E. (2010). Coots use hatch order to learn to recognize and reject conspecific brood parasitic chicks. Nature 463, 223–226.

A journal article with 3 authors

Liu, Z.-K., Wang, Y., and Shang, S. (2014). Thermal expansion anomaly regulated by entropy. Sci. Rep. 4, 7043.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Grill, S.W., Howard, J., Schäffer, E., Stelzer, E.H.K., and Hyman, A.A. (2003). The distribution of active force generators controls mitotic spindle position. Science 301, 518–521.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bai, Y. (2012). Practical Database Programming with Visual Basic.NET (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

Paliouras, G., Papadopoulos, S., Vogiatzis, D., and Kompatsiaris, Y. eds. (2015). User Community Discovery (Springer International Publishing).

A chapter in an edited book

Thompson, K.O. (2016). The Humanities in Higher Education and Research in Taiwan: Current State and Challenges. In The Humanities in Contemporary Chinese Contexts The Humanities in Asia., E. T. Y. Chan and M. O’Sullivan, eds. (Springer), pp. 77–88.

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 Patterns.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). Treating ‘Stage 0’ Breast Cancer Doesn’t Always Save Women’s Lives So Should We Screen For It? IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/treating-stage-0-breast-cancer-doesn-t-always-save-women-s-lives-so-should-we/.

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 (1994). Weather Forecasting: Improvements Needed in Laboratory Software Development Processes (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

Cuomo, A.P. (2013). SB 48 and social media: Constituing an audience for and against California’s LGBT education legislation.

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

Poniewozik, J. (2017). Sex, Drugs and Archie. New York Times, C2.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

Full journal title	Patterns
ISSN (online)	2666-3899
Scope