How to format your references using the Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Xu, Z. (2013). Mechanics of metal-catecholate complexes: the roles of coordination state and metal types. Scientific reports, 3, 2914.
A journal article with 2 authors
Gatfield, D., & Schibler, U. (2007). Physiology. Proteasomes keep the circadian clock ticking. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316(5828), 1135–1136.
A journal article with 3 authors
Day, M., Langston, R., & Morris, R. G. M. (2003). Glutamate-receptor-mediated encoding and retrieval of paired-associate learning. Nature, 424(6945), 205–209.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Trauth, M. H., Maslin, M. A., Deino, A., & Strecker, M. R. (2005). Late Cenozoic moisture history of East Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 309(5743), 2051–2053.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
de Gyurky, S. M. (2006). The Cognitive Dynamics of Computer Science. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Castro, L. N. de, Zuben, F. J. V., & Knidel, H. (Eds.). (2007). Artificial Immune Systems: 6th International Conference, ICARIS 2007, Santos, Brazil, August 26-29, 2007. Proceedings (Vol. 4628). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Kreinovich, V., & Shpak, M. (2008). Decomposable Aggregability in Population Genetics and Evolutionary Computations: Algorithms and Computational Complexity. In A. Kelemen, A. Abraham, & Y. Liang (Eds.), Computational Intelligence in Medical Informatics (pp. 69–92). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2016, May 15). To Better Conserve Wildlife, Consider All Kinds Of Animals, Not Just The Ones We Hunt. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/better-conserve-wildlife-consider-all-kinds-animals-not-just-ones-we-hunt/. Accessed 30 October 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
Government Accountability Office. (1988). [Comments on DOT Authority To Requisition Vessels] (No. B-229258). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Myers, K. E. (2012). The First Determination of the Proton’s Weak Charge Through Parity-Violating Asymmetry Measurements in Elastic e + p and e + Al Scattering (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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
Marx, L. (2011, March 27). Lori McCoy and Edwin Rossman Jr. New York Times, p. ST15.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Xu 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Gatfield and Schibler 2007; Xu 2013).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

  • Two authors: (Gatfield and Schibler 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Trauth et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleResearch and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning
ISSN (online)1793-7078
Scope

Other styles