How to format your references using the Soft Robotics citation style

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

Gupta S. Avoiding Ambiguity. Nature. 2001;412(6847):589.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mitchell SJ, Silver RA. Glutamate Spillover Suppresses Inhibition by Activating Presynaptic MGluRs. Nature. 2000;404(6777):498–502.

A journal article with 3 authors

Petta JR, Lu H, Gossard AC. A Coherent Beam Splitter for Electronic Spin States. Science. 2010;327(5966):669–672.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Bell DR, Jorgensen P, Christophel EM, Palmer KL. Malaria Risk: Estimation of the Malaria Burden. Nature. 2005;437(7056):E3-4; discussion E4-5.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Campbell CA. The One-Page Project Manager for It Projects; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2008.

An edited book

Machine Learning: ECML 2007: 18th European Conference on Machine Learning, Warsaw, Poland, September 17-21, 2007. Proceedings; Kok, J. N.; Koronacki, J.; Mantaras, R. L. de; Matwin, S.; Mladenič, D.; Skowron, A., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007; Vol. 4701.

A chapter in an edited book

Kreutzer J. Cardiac Catheterization. In Critical Care of Children with Heart Disease: Basic Medical and Surgical Concepts; Munoz, R.; Morell, V.; Cruz, E.; Vetterly, C., Eds.; Springer: London, 2010; pp. 37–55.

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 Robotics.

Blog post

Fang J. Babbler Bird Speak is Remarkably Human-Like https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/blabber-bird-speak-remarkably-human/ (accessed Oct 30, 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. Status of the Department of Education’s Inventory of Its Data Collections; GAO-13-596R; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2013.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tu KN. Novel Bivalent Organophosphates as Inhibitors of Butyrylcholinesterase — Compounds with Potential for Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and Studies in the Development of Asymmetric Catalytic Kabachnik-Fields Reaction. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach: Long Beach, CA, 2013.

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

Walsh MW. Risky Moves in the Game of Life Insurance. New York Times, 2015, BU1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Soft Robotics
ISSN (print)	2169-5172
ISSN (online)	2169-5180
Scope