How to format your references using the Soft Computing citation style

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

Putterman L (2010) Behavior. Cooperation and punishment. Science 328:578–579

A journal article with 2 authors

Wang R, Yan X (2014) Superior asymmetric supercapacitor based on Ni-Co oxide nanosheets and carbon nanorods. Sci Rep 4:3712

A journal article with 3 authors

Mongillo G, Barak O, Tsodyks M (2008) Synaptic theory of working memory. Science 319:1543–1546

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Koehl A, Hu H, Maeda S, et al (2018) Structure of the µ-opioid receptor-Gi protein complex. Nature 558:547–552

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Hao L, Lawrence J (2006) Laser Surface Treatment of Bio-Implant Materials. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Fleenor BS (2015) Arterial Stiffness: Implications and Interventions. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

MacBride F (2007) On Finite Hume. In: Cook RT (ed) The Arché Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 85–93

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 Soft Computing.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Surinam Toad Childbirth: Trypophobics Need Not Apply. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1995) Law Enforcement Block Grant Awards. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Nakano AM (2012) Community college swirlers and the transfer function. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Kenigsberg B (2017) Boris Without Beatrice. New York Times C7

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Putterman 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Putterman 2010; Wang and Yan 2014).

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

Two authors: (Wang and Yan 2014)
Three or more authors: (Koehl et al. 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Soft Computing
Abbreviation	Soft Comput.
ISSN (print)	1432-7643
ISSN (online)	1433-7479
Scope	Software Geometry and Topology Theoretical Computer Science