How to format your references using the Spine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Spine. 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	Download the output style file
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

Burgess D. Taking on that first faculty job. Nature 2007;447:1142.

A journal article with 2 authors

Phadnis N, Orr HA. A single gene causes both male sterility and segregation distortion in Drosophila hybrids. Science 2009;323:376–9.

A journal article with 3 authors

Li B, Yu Z-H, Fei S-M. Geometry of quantum computation with qutrits. Sci Rep 2013;3:2594.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Burlaga LF, Ness NF, Acuña MH, et al. Crossing the termination shock into the heliosheath: magnetic fields. Science 2005;309:2027–9.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Barnes T. Constantine. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons Ltd; 2013.

An edited book

Li Y. Leakage Resilient Password Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

Markic S, Broggy J, Childs P. How to Deal with Linguistic Issues in Chemistry Classes. In: Eilks I, Hofstein A, eds. Teaching Chemistry – A Studybook: A Practical Guide and Textbook for Student Teachers, Teacher Trainees and Teachers. Rotterdam: SensePublishers; 2013:127–52.

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 Spine.

Blog post

Hale T. This Woman Lived Without Lungs For Six Days. IFLScience. Available at https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/this-woman-lived-without-lungs-for-six-days/. 2017, Accessed October 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. Telecommunications: GSA Needs to Share and Prioritize Lessons Learned to Avoid Future Transition Delays. GAO-14-63; Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; December 5, 2013.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Barrie DB. On the interaction of wind energy with climate and weather. Doctoral Dissertation; University of Maryland, College Park; 2010.

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

Sisario B. ‘La La Land’ Music Jumps to No. 2. New York Times, January 16, 2017, C3.

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	Spine
Abbreviation	Spine (Phila. Pa. 1976)
ISSN (print)	0362-2436
ISSN (online)	1528-1159
Scope	Clinical Neurology Orthopedics and Sports Medicine