How to format your references using the Smart Learning Environments citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Smart Learning Environments. 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
K. Zahnle, Nature 412, 209 (2001).
A journal article with 2 authors
D. Chen and X. L. Ma, Sci. Rep. 3, 3157 (2013).
A journal article with 3 authors
A. F. Sarrazin, A. D. Peel, and M. Averof, Science 336, 338 (2012).
A journal article with 4 or more authors
A. Sauerwald, W. Zhu, T. A. Major, H. Roy, S. Palioura, D. Jahn, W. B. Whitman, J. R. Yates 3rd, M. Ibba, and D. Söll, Science 307, 1969 (2005).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Equipment Testing Procedures Committee of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Trayed and Packed Columns (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2014).
An edited book
V. Matoušek and P. Mautner, editors , Text, Speech and Dialogue: 12th International Conference, TSD 2009, Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 13-17, 2009. Proceedings (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009).
A chapter in an edited book
P. M. Bleher, in New Trends in Mathematical Physics: Selected Contributions of the XVth International Congress on Mathematical Physics, edited by V. Sidoravičius (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2009), pp. 59–72.

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 Smart Learning Environments.

Blog post
T. Hale, IFLScience (2016).

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, Second-Year Implementation of the Federal Managers’ Financial Integrity Act in the Department of Education (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1985).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Y. H.-H. Tseng, Motivation of Participation in Inservice Training Based on Problem Solving: A Modified Delphi Study, Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, 2008.

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
A. Qin, New York Times C1 (2015).

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zahnle 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Chen and Ma 2013; Zahnle 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Chen and Ma 2013)
  • Three or more authors: (Sauerwald et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal titleSmart Learning Environments
AbbreviationSmart Learn. Environ.
ISSN (online)2196-7091
Scope

Other styles