How to format your references using the Precision Engineering citation style

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

Varki A. Glycan-based interactions involving vertebrate sialic-acid-recognizing proteins. Nature 2007;446:1023–9.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Wilson TD, Bar-Anan Y. Psychology. The unseen mind. Science 2008;321:1046–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Knigge C, Coe MJ, Podsiadlowski P. Two populations of X-ray pulsars produced by two types of supernova. Nature 2011;479:372–5.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Lee KC, Sprague MR, Sussman BJ, Nunn J, Langford NK, Jin X-M, et al. Entangling macroscopic diamonds at room temperature. Science 2011;334:1253–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Wempen F. Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2010 Bible. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2010.

An edited book

[1]

Richt JA, Webby RJ, editors. Swine Influenza. vol. 370. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Bihari BL, Wong M, Wang A, de Supinski BR, Chen W. A Case for Including Transactions in OpenMP II: Hardware Transactional Memory. In: Chapman BM, Massaioli F, Müller MS, Rorro M, editors. OpenMP in a Heterogeneous World: 8th International Workshop on OpenMP, IWOMP 2012, Rome, Italy, June 11-13, 2012. Proceedings, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2012, p. 44–58.

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 Precision Engineering.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E. Tropical Forests Will Still Exist In 2100 – But They Will Be A Sorry Sight. 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. Student Loan Marketing Association’s Loan Consolidation Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1983.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Annan F. Spatial pattern of yield distributions: implications for crop insurance. Doctoral dissertation. Mississippi State 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]

Van Gelder SKC by L. Arts, Briefly; Can They Make Book on Dostoyevsky? New York Times 2005:E4.

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	Precision Engineering
Abbreviation	Precis. Eng.
ISSN (print)	0141-6359
Scope	General Engineering