How to format your references using the Robotics and Autonomous Systems citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 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]

N.L. Farr, Questioning placebo controls, Science. 288 (2000) 1747c.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

I.M. Young, J.W. Crawford, Interactions and self-organization in the soil-microbe complex, Science. 304 (2004) 1634–1637.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, P. Bloom, Social evaluation by preverbal infants, Nature. 450 (2007) 557–559.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S.J. Demarest, M. Martinez-Yamout, J. Chung, H. Chen, W. Xu, H.J. Dyson, R.M. Evans, P.E. Wright, Mutual synergistic folding in recruitment of CBP/p300 by p160 nuclear receptor coactivators, Nature. 415 (2002) 549–553.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. Wexler, J. Shaffer, A. Cotgreave, The Big Book of Dashboards, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2017.

An edited book

[1]

M. Wirsing, M. Hofmann, A. Rauschmayer, eds., Trustworthly Global Computing: 5th International Symposium, TGC 2010, Munich, Germany, February 24-26, 2010, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J.E. Mottershead, M. Link, T.A.N. Silva, Y. Govers, H.H. Khodaparast, The Sensitivity Method in Stochastic Model Updating, in: J.K. Sinha (Ed.), Vibration Engineering and Technology of Machinery: Proceedings of VETOMAC X 2014, Held at the University of Manchester, UK, September 9-11, 2014, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 65–77.

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 Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, How Did Palm Oil Become Such A Problem — And What Can We Do About It?, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-did-palm-oil-become-such-problem-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Telecommunications: FCC Should Include Call Quality in Its Annual Report on Competition in Mobile Phone Services, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2003.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

X.S. Chen, Social Support Communication Behavior, Anxiety Symptomatology, and Marital Satisfaction Among Distressed Couples, Doctoral dissertation, 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

[1]

M. Paulson, Soho Rep to Return, New York Times. (2017) C3.

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	Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Abbreviation	Rob. Auton. Syst.
ISSN (print)	0921-8890
Scope	Computer Science Applications Software Control and Systems Engineering General Mathematics