How to format your references using the Societies citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Societies. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Urban, M.C. Climate Change. Accelerating Extinction Risk from Climate Change. Science 2015, 348, 571–573.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tram, U.; Sullivan, W. Role of Delayed Nuclear Envelope Breakdown and Mitosis in Wolbachia-Induced Cytoplasmic Incompatibility. Science 2002, 296, 1124–1126.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dixon, E.; Shapiro, A.; Lu, Z.-L. Scale-Invariance in Brightness Illusions Implicates Object-Level Visual Processing. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 3900.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Zofall, M.; Fischer, T.; Zhang, K.; Zhou, M.; Cui, B.; Veenstra, T.D.; Grewal, S.I.S. Histone H2A.Z Cooperates with RNAi and Heterochromatin Factors to Suppress Antisense RNAs. Nature 2009, 461, 419–422.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ibe, E.H. Terrestrial Radiation Effects in ULSI Devices and Electronic Systems; John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd: Singapore, 2014; ISBN 9781118479308.

An edited book

Mechanics of Natural Solids; Kolymbas, D., Viggiani, G., Eds.; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009; ISBN 9783642035777.

A chapter in an edited book

Vinel, A.; Artières, T. Maximizing Edit Distance Accuracy with Hidden Conditional Random Fields. In Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns: 15th International Conference, CAIP 2013, York, UK, August 27-29, 2013, Proceedings, Part I; Wilson, R., Hancock, E., Bors, A., Smith, W., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013; pp. 45–53 ISBN 9783642402609.

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 Societies.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. NASA Plans Exo-Brake Parachute Test To Bring Satellites Out Of Orbit (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

Government Accountability Office Satellite Communications: Strategic Approach Needed for DOD’s Procurement of Commercial Satellite Bandwidth; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2003;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hagarty, E.P. A Predictive Risk Modeling System for the Management of Small-Scale Water and Wastewater Facilities: Toward Long-Term Sustainability of Our National Parks. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University: Washington, DC, 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

Wines, M. A Racial Divide Remains Over Views of Justice. New York Times 2014, A1.

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	Societies
Abbreviation	Societies (Basel)
ISSN (online)	2075-4698
Scope