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:

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
Mills E (2005) Environment. The specter of fuel-based lighting. Science 308:1263–1264
A journal article with 2 authors
Thoroughman KA, Shadmehr R (2000) Learning of action through adaptive combination of motor primitives. Nature 407:742–747
A journal article with 3 authors
van Loenhout MTJ, de Grunt MV, Dekker C (2012) Dynamics of DNA supercoils. Science 338:94–97
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Jang M, Czoschke NM, Lee S, Kamens RM (2002) Heterogeneous atmospheric aerosol production by acid-catalyzed particle-phase reactions. Science 298:814–817

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Wagner K, Doroslovački M (2013) Proportionate-Type Normalized Least Mean Square Algorithms. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA
An edited book
Gorodetskiy AE (ed) (2016) Smart Electromechanical Systems. Springer International Publishing, Cham
A chapter in an edited book
De Salve A, Mori P, Ricci L, et al (2016) Privacy-Preserving Data Allocation in Decentralized Online Social Networks. In: Jelasity M, Kalyvianaki E (eds) Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 16th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2016, Held as Part of the 11th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2016, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 6-9, 2016, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 47–60

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 (2015) The River Nile As Seen From Space. 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 (1989) Research and Development: Funding of Jet Aircraft Engines for Fiscal Years 1984-1988. 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
Liang C-C (2013) Fate of bacterial and viral indicators in an advanced wastewater treatment plant. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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
Kishkovsky S (2014) Tatiana Samoilova, 80, Soviet Movie Star. New York Times B10

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mills 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Thoroughman and Shadmehr 2000; Mills 2005).

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

  • Two authors: (Thoroughman and Shadmehr 2000)
  • Three or more authors: (Jang et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal titleSoft Computing
AbbreviationSoft Comput.
ISSN (print)1432-7643
ISSN (online)1433-7479
ScopeSoftware
Geometry and Topology
Theoretical Computer Science

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