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

Eisenstein M (2010) Diversity: Of beans and genes. Nature 468:S13-5

A journal article with 2 authors

Thisse C, Zon LI (2002) Organogenesis--heart and blood formation from the zebrafish point of view. Science 295:457–462

A journal article with 3 authors

Stajic J, Coontz R, Osborne I (2011) Superconductivity. Happy 100th, superconductivity! Introduction. Science 332:189

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Banavath HN, Sharma OP, Kumar MS, Baskaran R (2014) Identification of novel tyrosine kinase inhibitors for drug resistant T315I mutant BCR-ABL: a virtual screening and molecular dynamics simulations study. Sci Rep 4:6948

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bachmutsky A (2010) System Design for Telecommunication Gateways. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Nair PKR, Garrity D (eds) (2012) Agroforestry - The Future of Global Land Use. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Liu P, Li R, Xu Z (2016) THz Waveforms and Polarization from Laser Induced Plasmas by Few-Cycle Pulses. In: Bandrauk AD, Lorin E, Moloney JV (eds) Laser Filamentation: Mathematical Methods and Models. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 97–120

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) Museum Launches Campaign To Save Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/museum-launches-campaign-save-neil-armstrong-s-spacesuit/. 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 (2005) International Air Passengers: Staffing Model for Airport Inspections Personnel Can Be Improved. 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

Zinda ES (2017) American Cerberus: Pit Bulls and Psyche in the United States. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute

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

Chapman MM (2014) Hundreds in Detroit Protest Over Move to Shut Off Water. New York Times A13

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Eisenstein 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Thisse and Zon 2002; Eisenstein 2010).

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

Two authors: (Thisse and Zon 2002)
Three or more authors: (Banavath et al. 2014)

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

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