How to format your references using the Public Health citation style

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

Staunton H. Arousal by stimulation of deep-brain nuclei. Nature. 2008 Mar 6;452(7183):E1; discussion E1-2.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mattick JS, Gagen MJ. Mathematics/computation. Accelerating networks. Science. 2005 Feb 11;307(5711):856–8.

A journal article with 3 authors

Rouse GW, Goffredi SK, Vrijenhoek RC. Osedax: bone-eating marine worms with dwarf males. Science. 2004 Jul 30;305(5684):668–71.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Choi SB, Wang C, Muench DG, Ozawa K, Franceschi VR, Wu Y, et al. Messenger RNA targeting of rice seed storage proteins to specific ER subdomains. Nature. 2000 Oct 12;407(6805):765–7.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hochberg Z. Evo-Devo of Child Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2011.

An edited book

Kole C, editor. Cereals and Millets. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. XXIII, 349 p. (Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants; vol. 1).

A chapter in an edited book

de Haas C, Ryan R. Family Centered Care in a Health Care Setting. In: Rubin IL, Merrick J, Greydanus DE, Patel DR, editors. Health Care for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities across the Lifespan. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. p. 49–58.

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 Public Health.

Blog post

Andrews R. What’s Going On With These Weird Ripply Clouds? [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2017 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/physics/weird-ripply-clouds/

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. Education Programs: Information on Major Preschool, Elementary, and Secondary Education Programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1997 Sep. Report No.: HEHS-97-210R.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Salmons I. Best Practices for Managing Burnout in Attorneys [Doctoral dissertation]. [Malibu, CA]: Pepperdine University; 2017.

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

Oestreich JR. A Festival to Re-energize Your Inner Self. New York Times. 2016 Oct 17;C1.

In-text citations

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

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	Public Health
Abbreviation	Public Health
ISSN (print)	0033-3506
ISSN (online)	1476-5616
Scope	General Medicine Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health