How to format your references using the SpringerPlus citation style

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

Insel TR (2010) Rethinking schizophrenia. Nature 468:187–193

A journal article with 2 authors

Thompson WG, Goldstein SL (2005) Open-system coral ages reveal persistent suborbital sea-level cycles. Science 308:401–404

A journal article with 3 authors

Jan CH, Williams CC, Weissman JS (2015) LOCAL TRANSLATION. Response to Comment on “Principles of ER cotranslational translocation revealed by proximity-specific ribosome profiling.” Science 348:1217

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Hirschey MD, Shimazu T, Goetzman E, et al (2010) SIRT3 regulates mitochondrial fatty-acid oxidation by reversible enzyme deacetylation. Nature 464:121–125

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Benchaib A (2015) Advanced Control of AC/DC Power Networks. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Beatley T (ed) (2012) Green Cities of Europe: Global Lessons on Green Urbanism. Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, Washington, DC

A chapter in an edited book

Gadducci F, Lluch Lafuente A, Vandin A (2012) Exploiting Over- and Under-Approximations for Infinite-State Counterpart Models. In: Ehrig H, Engels G, Kreowski H-J, Rozenberg G (eds) Graph Transformations: 6th International Conference, ICGT 2012, Bremen, Germany, September 24-29, 2012. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 51–65

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 SpringerPlus.

Blog post

Andrews R (2016) Extremely Young Lava Flows Spotted On Venus. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/extremely-young-lava-flows-spotted-venus/. 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) Business Systems Modernization: Internal Revenue Service’s Fiscal Year 2005 Expenditure Plan. 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

Garcia RD (2008) Designing an autonomous helicopter testbed: From conception through implementation. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida

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

Grow ML (2015) Gun Rights for Terrorists. New York Times A27

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Insel 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Thompson and Goldstein 2005; Insel 2010).

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

Two authors: (Thompson and Goldstein 2005)
Three or more authors: (Hirschey et al. 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	SpringerPlus
Abbreviation	Springerplus
ISSN (online)	2193-1801
Scope	Multidisciplinary