How to format your references using the Positivity citation style

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

Luntz, A.C.: Chemistry. Toward vibrational mode control in catalysis. Science. 302, 70–71 (2003)

A journal article with 2 authors

Goodson, J.L., Bass, A.H.: Forebrain peptides modulate sexually polymorphic vocal circuitry. Nature. 403, 769–772 (2000)

A journal article with 3 authors

Venditti, C., Meade, A., Pagel, M.: Multiple routes to mammalian diversity. Nature. 479, 393–396 (2011)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Xin, H., Liu, D., Wan, M., Safari, A., Kim, H., Sun, W., O’Connor, M.S., Songyang, Z.: TPP1 is a homologue of ciliate TEBP-beta and interacts with POT1 to recruit telomerase. Nature. 445, 559–562 (2007)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tattar, P.N., Ramaiah, S., Manjunath, B.G.: A Course in Statistics With R. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK (2016)

An edited book

Buchmann, J.: Binary Quadratic Forms: An Algorithmic Approach. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2007)

A chapter in an edited book

Billington, D.: Propositional Clausal Defeasible Logic. In: Hölldobler, S., Lutz, C., and Wansing, H. (eds.) Logics in Artificial Intelligence: 11th European Conference, JELIA 2008, Dresden, Germany, September 28-October 1, 2008. Proceedings. pp. 34–47. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2008)

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 Positivity.

Blog post

Hale, T.: Stunning Time-Lapse Video Of The Starry Night Sky, https://www.iflscience.com/space/stunning-timelapse-video-of-the-starry-night-sky/

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: Federal Research: Advanced Technology Program’s Indirect Cost Rates and Program Evaluation Status. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1993)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Rich, J.B.: Guinevere takes her seat at the Round Table—or does she? Moving a primary Western myth forward, (2009)

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

Walsh, M.W.: Hispanic Contingent in Congress Asks Treasury to Prevent ‘Catastrophe’ in Puerto Rico, (2015)

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	Positivity
Abbreviation	Positivity
ISSN (print)	1385-1292
ISSN (online)	1572-9281
Scope	General Mathematics Analysis Theoretical Computer Science