How to format your references using the Small citation style

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

E. P. Diamandis, Science 2015, 349, 206.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. J. Morrison, D. T. Scadden, Nature 2014, 505, 327.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

L. Chen, K. L. Dürr, E. Gouaux, Science 2014, 345, 1021.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. Yatsui, T. Imoto, T. Mochizuki, K. Kitamura, T. Kawazoe, Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 4561.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. Holloway, C. Nwaoha, Dictionary of Industrial Terms, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

M. R. Murty, Transcendental Numbers, Springer, New York, NY, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

H. Zheng, G. Yang, in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on High-Speed and Intercity Railways: Volume 2 (Eds: Y.-Q. Ni, X.-W. Ye), Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 31–39.

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 Small.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, “Some people think astrology is a science – here’s why,” can be found under https://www.iflscience.com/brain/some-people-think-astrology-science-–-heres-why/, 2014.

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, Digests of Unpublished Decisions of the Comptroller General of the United States, Vol. II, No. 12, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1986.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M. Obiedat, Incrementally Sorted Lattice Data Structures, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 2015.

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]

J. Williams, New York Times 2017, BR4.

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	Small
Abbreviation	Small
ISSN (print)	1613-6810
ISSN (online)	1613-6829
Scope	Biotechnology Engineering (miscellaneous) Biomaterials