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
J. D. Schnittman, Science 341, 964 (2013).
A journal article with 2 authors
F. Powrie and K. J. Maloy, Science 299, 1030 (2003).
A journal article with 3 authors
L. Gizon, T. L. Duvall, and J. Schou, Nature 421, 43 (2003).
A journal article with 4 or more authors
T. M. Blackburn, P. Cassey, R. P. Duncan, K. L. Evans, and K. J. Gaston, Science 305, 1955 (2004).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
P. Weston, Bioinformatics Software Engineering (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2006).
An edited book
C. Wetzelhuetter, editor , Groundwater in the Coastal Zones of Asia-Pacific (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2013).
A chapter in an edited book
R. Martinez-Duarte, G. T. Teixidor, P. P. Mukherjee, Q. Kang, and M. J. Madou, in Microfluidics and Microfabrication, edited by S. Chakraborty (Springer US, Boston, MA, 2010), pp. 181–263.

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
S. Luntz, IFLScience (2017).

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, Metropolitan Planning Organizations: Options Exist to Enhance Transportation Planning Capacity and Federal Oversight (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2009).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
R. A. Alayed, Creating a Culture of Safety Using Electronic Medical Records as a Tool, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2010.

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
M. M. Chapman, New York Times B4 (2017).

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schnittman 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Powrie and Maloy 2003; Schnittman 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Powrie and Maloy 2003)
  • Three or more authors: (Blackburn et al. 2004)

About the journal

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

Other styles