How to format your references using the Software Quality Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Software Quality Journal. 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

Kessin, R. H. (2010). Microbiology. Sex and sacrifice. Science (New York, N.Y.), 330(6010), 1487–1488.

A journal article with 2 authors

Jansen, M., & Letschert, H. P. (2000). Inorganic yellow-red pigments without toxic metals. Nature, 404(6781), 980–982.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wang, K., Mittler, J. E., & Samudrala, R. (2006). Comment on “Evidence for positive epistasis in HIV-1.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 312(5775), 848; author reply 848.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Steinmetz, P. N., Roy, A., Fitzgerald, P. J., Hsiao, S. S., Johnson, K. O., & Niebur, E. (2000). Attention modulates synchronized neuronal firing in primate somatosensory cortex. Nature, 404(6774), 187–190.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Placzek, D., Bielecki, R., Messing, M., & Schwarzer, F., Tunnel. (2016). Zielgenau bis ans Ende des Tunnels. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

An edited book

Issar, G. (2016). Operational Excellence: A Concise Guide to Basic Concepts and Their Application. (L. R. Navon, Ed.) (1st ed. 2016.). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Lowe, R., & Kiryazov, K. (2014). Utilizing Emotions in Autonomous Robots: An Enactive Approach. In T. Bosse, J. Broekens, J. Dias, & J. van der Zwaan (Eds.), Emotion Modeling: Towards Pragmatic Computational Models of Affective Processes (pp. 76–98). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Software Quality Journal.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2014, November 10). 52 Of The Most Common Myths and Misconceptions Debunked In One Infographic. IFLScience. IFLScience. Accessed 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. (1999). Customs Service Modernization: Actions Initiated to Correct ACE Management and Technical Weaknesses (No. AIMD-99-198R). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Sugawara, Y. (2013). When the Spaniels conquered Central America: Academic English and first year composition instruction (Doctoral dissertation). University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

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

Risen, J. (2016, December 18). Hussein, the C.I.A. and Me. New York Times, p. C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kessin 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Jansen and Letschert 2000; Kessin 2010).

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

Two authors: (Jansen and Letschert 2000)
Three or more authors: (Steinmetz et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Software Quality Journal
Abbreviation	Softw. Qual. J.
ISSN (print)	0963-9314
ISSN (online)	1573-1367
Scope	Software Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality