How to format your references using the Serials Review citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Serials Review. 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.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
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
Snoke, D. (2002). Spontaneous Bose coherence of excitons and polaritons. Science (New York, N.Y.), 298(5597), 1368–1372.
A journal article with 2 authors
Griffith, L. G., & Naughton, G. (2002). Tissue engineering--current challenges and expanding opportunities. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5557), 1009–1014.
A journal article with 3 authors
Janetopoulos, C., Jin, T., & Devreotes, P. (2001). Receptor-mediated activation of heterotrimeric G-proteins in living cells. Science (New York, N.Y.), 291(5512), 2408–2411.
A journal article with 21 or more authors
Gan, B., Hu, J., Jiang, S., Liu, Y., Sahin, E., Zhuang, L., Fletcher-Sananikone, E., Colla, S., Wang, Y. A., Chin, L., & Depinho, R. A. (2010). Lkb1 regulates quiescence and metabolic homeostasis of haematopoietic stem cells. Nature, 468(7324), 701–704.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Nakhjiri, M., & Nakhjiri, M. (2006). AAA and Network Security for Mobile Access. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An edited book
Garcia, A., Choren, R., Lucena, C., Giorgini, P., Holvoet, T., & Romanovsky, A. (Eds.). (2006). Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems IV: Research Issues and Practical Applications (Vol. 3914). Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Chang, N.-H., Kinoshita, M., & Nishihara, Y. (2013). Liquid Crystals. In Y. Nishihara (Ed.), Applied Cross-Coupling Reactions (pp. 111–135). 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 Serials Review.

Blog post
Luntz, S. (2016, July 26). People With Bipolar Symptoms Wait Six Years On Average For Treatment. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (2005). Federal Student Loans: Challenges in Estimating Federal Subsidy Costs (GAO-05-874). 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
Whitesides, V. J. (2017). The Large Ensemble/European Classical Music Paradigm and African American-Originated Dance-Musicking: A Dispositival Analysis of U.S. Secondary Music Education [Doctoral dissertation]. George Washington University.

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
Rothenberg, B. (2017, May 29). Sharing a Name With His Game, and Doing His Best to Live Up to It. New York Times, D5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Snoke, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Griffith & Naughton, 2002; Snoke, 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Griffith & Naughton, 2002)
  • Three or more authors: (Gan et al., 2010)

About the journal

Full journal titleSerials Review
ISSN (print)0098-7913
ScopeLibrary and Information Sciences

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