How to format your references using the Robotics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Robotics. 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
1.
Strasser, B.J. Who Cares about the Double Helix? Nature 2003, 422, 803–804.
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Davies, N.B.; Welbergen, J.A. Social Transmission of a Host Defense against Cuckoo Parasitism. Science 2009, 324, 1318–1320.
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Esteban, J.; Mayoral, L.; Ray, D. Ethnicity and Conflict: Theory and Facts. Science 2012, 336, 858–865.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
1.
Leutgeb, S.; Leutgeb, J.K.; Barnes, C.A.; Moser, E.I.; McNaughton, B.L.; Moser, M.-B. Independent Codes for Spatial and Episodic Memory in Hippocampal Neuronal Ensembles. Science 2005, 309, 619–623.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Chaskalson, M. The Mindful Workplace; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2011; ISBN 9781119976974.
An edited book
1.
Hybrid Soft Computing for Image Segmentation; Bhattacharyya, S., Dutta, P., De, S., Klepac, G., Eds.; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2016; ISBN 9783319472225.
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Novak, I.; Praetorius, J. Fundamentals of Bicarbonate Secretion in Epithelia. In Ion Channels and Transporters of Epithelia in Health and Disease; Hamilton, K.L., Devor, D.C., Eds.; Springer: New York, NY, 2016; pp. 187–263 ISBN 9781493933648.

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.

Blog post
1.
Andrew, E. Scientists Now Able to Track Individual Cells Throughout Embryonic Development (accessed on 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
1.
Government Accountability Office Space Transportation System; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1974;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Brandom, B.M. Spiritual and Emotional Needs of Young Adults Who Are Members of Mainstream Protestant Churches. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2009.

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.
Schilling, M.K. The Accidental Tourist. New York Times 2017, M2106.

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 titleRobotics
ISSN (online)2218-6581
Scope

Other styles