How to format your references using the Reliability Engineering and System Safety citation style

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

Macilwain C. World view: Leaders wanted. Nature 2010;466:919.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Horn PJ, Peterson CL. Molecular biology. Chromatin higher order folding--wrapping up transcription. Science 2002;297:1824–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Beddington JR, Agnew DJ, Clark CW. Current problems in the management of marine fisheries. Science 2007;316:1713–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Du X, Skachko I, Duerr F, Luican A, Andrei EY. Fractional quantum Hall effect and insulating phase of Dirac electrons in graphene. Nature 2009;462:192–5.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Hinkelmann K, Kempthorne O. Design and Analysis of Experiments: Advanced Experimental Design. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2005.

An edited book

[1]

Madden B, editor. Treatment of Pulmonary Hypertension. 1st ed. 2015. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Friis C, Karlsson C, Paulsson T. Relating Entrepreneurship to Economic Growth. In: Johansson B, Karlsson C, Stough R, editors. The Emerging Digital Economy: Entrepreneurship, Clusters, and Policy, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006, p. 83–111.

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 Reliability Engineering and System Safety.

Blog post

[1]

Davis J. Serbian Orthodox Church Demands Museum Hands Over Ashes Of Nikola Tesla. IFLScience 2016.

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. Offshoring: U.S. Semiconductor and Software Industries Increasingly Produce in China and India. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2006.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Stevens S. Aboard and Beyond. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington 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

[1]

Dominus S. In and Out of the Spotlight, a Mother-Daughter Act for the Ages. New York Times 2016:A13.

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	Reliability Engineering and System Safety
Abbreviation	Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf.
ISSN (print)	0951-8320
Scope	Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality