How to format your references using the Practical Laboratory Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Practical Laboratory Medicine. 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]

L. Odling-Smee, Science education: a science giant moves house, Nature 496 (2013) 167.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

R. Fodde, R. Smits, Cancer biology. A matter of dosage, Science 298 (2002) 761–763.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.C. Nemecek, M. Wüthrich, B.S. Klein, Global control of dimorphism and virulence in fungi, Science 312 (2006) 583–588.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S.A. Wilde, J.W. Valley, W.H. Peck, C.M. Graham, Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago, Nature 409 (2001) 175–178.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S.A. McCrary, Mastering Corporate Finance Essentials, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

An edited book

[1]

A. Nuzzolo, N.H.M. Wilson, eds., Schedule-Based Modeling of Transportation Networks: Theory and applications, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

O. Giraud, B. Georgeot, J. Martin, Entanglement and Localization of Wavefunctions, in: G. Casati, D. Matrasulov (Eds.), Complex Phenomena in Nanoscale Systems, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2009: pp. 51–63.

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 Practical Laboratory Medicine.

Blog post

[1]

D. Andrew, 17 Signs You’re Intelligent — Even If It Doesn’t Feel Like It, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/brain/17-signs-youre-intelligent-even-if-doesnt-feel-like-it/ (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, VA Student Financial Aid: Actions Needed to Reduce Overlap in Approval Activities, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2007.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.C. Crider, The social and environmental effects of shrimp mariculture: Case studies of two coastal villages in Ecuador, Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic University, 2012.

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. Casselman, Experts Foresee a U.S. Work Force Defined by Ever Widening Divides, New York Times (2017) B3.

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	Practical Laboratory Medicine
Abbreviation	Pract. Lab. Med.
ISSN (print)	2352-5517
Scope