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.
Williams, R. Slowing the Decline. Nature 2010, 466, S13-4.
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Rees, D.C.; Howard, J.B. The Interface between the Biological and Inorganic Worlds: Iron-Sulfur Metalloclusters. Science 2003, 300, 929–931.
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Fischer, J.; Baumgartner, J.; Marschner, C. Synthesis and Structure of Sila-Adamantane. Science 2005, 310, 825.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
1.
Palombo, M.; Gabrielli, A.; Servedio, V.D.P.; Ruocco, G.; Capuani, S. Structural Disorder and Anomalous Diffusion in Random Packing of Spheres. Sci. Rep. 2013, 3, 2631.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Morley, D. Communications and Mobility; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2017; ISBN 9781119372080.
An edited book
1.
Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics: 10th International Meeting, CIBB 2013, Nice, France, June 20-22, 2013, Revised Selected Papers; Formenti, E., Tagliaferri, R., Wit, E., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2014; Vol. 8452; ISBN 9783319090412.
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Buldas, A.; Laur, S. Do Broken Hash Functions Affect the Security of Time-Stamping Schemes? In Applied Cryptography and Network Security: 4th International Conference, ACNS 2006, Singapore, June 6-9, 2006. Proceedings; Zhou, J., Yung, M., Bao, F., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006; pp. 50–65 ISBN 9783540347033.

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.
Bedell-Pearce, H. Meet The Newborn Sengis Who Are More Like Elephants Than Shrews Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/meet-the-newborn-sengis-who-are-more-like-elephants-than-shrews/ (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 D.C. Emergency Highway Relief Act; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1996;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Pittsinger, R.F. The Effect of a Single Bout of Surfing on Exercise-Induced Affect. 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.
Morone, J.A. Scarface. New York Times 2016, BR36.

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