How to format your references using the Rare Diseases citation style

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

McCormick S. Plant science. Reproductive dialog. Science 2007; 317:606–7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Martin LB, Coon CAC. Immunology. Infection protection and natural selection. Science 2010; 330:602–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

Xiong Q, Znamenskiy P, Zador AM. Selective corticostriatal plasticity during acquisition of an auditory discrimination task. Nature 2015; 521:348–51.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Zhang Y, Blattman JN, Kennedy NJ, Duong J, Nguyen T, Wang Y, Davis RJ, Greenberg PD, Flavell RA, Dong C. Regulation of innate and adaptive immune responses by MAP kinase phosphatase 5. Nature 2004; 430:793–7.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

German Geotechnical Society. Recommendations for Design and Analysis of Earth Structures using Geosynthetic Reinforcements - EBGEO. Berlin, Germany: Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH & Co. KG; 2012.

An edited book

Mikosch T, Kreiß J-P, Davis RA, Andersen TG, editors. Handbook of Financial Time Series. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

Lei K, Tang H, Zeng Y. Keywords Extraction via Multi-relational Network Construction. In: Nagamalai D, Kumar A, Annamalai A, editors. Advances in Computational Science, Engineering and Information Technology: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Science, Engineering and Information Technology (CCSEIT-2013), KTO Karatay University, June 7-9, 2013, Konya,Turkey - Volume 1. Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing; 2013. page 33–45.

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 Rare Diseases.

Blog post

Carpineti A. Charon Helps Pluto Keep Its Atmosphere [Internet]. IFLScience2017 [cited 2018 Oct 30]; Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/charon-helps-pluto-keep-its-atmosphere/

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. Air Traffic Control: Analysis of Proposal to Create a Government Corporation. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Wells JP. A case study of educators’ perceptions of the effects of high -stakes testing and accountability policies on high- and low-poverty middle schools in a Maryland school district. 2010;

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

Kelly D. Who’s the Greatest of Them All? New York Times1993; :724.

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	Rare Diseases
Abbreviation	Rare Dis.
ISSN (online)	2167-5511
Scope	General Medicine