How to format your references using the Surgery Today citation style

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

1. Drmanac R. Medicine. The ultimate genetic test. Science. 2012;336:1110–2.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Andreasen R, Sharma M. Solar nebula heterogeneity in p-process samarium and neodymium isotopes. Science. 2006;314:806–9.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Lu K, Lu L, Suresh S. Strengthening materials by engineering coherent internal boundaries at the nanoscale. Science. 2009;324:349–52.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Itoh T, Koshiba S, Kigawa T, Kikuchi A, Yokoyama S, Takenawa T. Role of the ENTH domain in phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate binding and endocytosis. Science. 2001;291:1047–51.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Smith V. Toni Morrison. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2012.

An edited book

1. Sui Pheng L. Service Quality for Facilities Management in Hospitals. Rui Z, editor. Singapore: Springer; 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Yan X, Wang S, El-Latif AAA, Sang J, Niu X. A Novel Perceptual Secret Sharing Scheme. In: Shi YQ, Liu F, Yan W, editors. Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security IX: Special Issue on Visual Cryptography. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2014. p. 68–90.

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 Surgery Today.

Blog post

1. Fang J. Squid and Humans Evolved the Same Eye [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2014 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/squid-and-humans-evolved-same-eye/

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

1. Government Accountability Office. The Job Training Partnership Act: Abuse of On-The-Job Training and Other Contracting Is an Ongoing Problem. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1992 Jul. Report No.: T-HRD-92-47.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Okafor-Dike LC. The effect of leadership on economic development: A case study of Nigeria [Doctoral dissertation]. [Phoenix, AZ]: University of Phoenix; 2008.

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

1. Rashbaum WK, Kaplan T. U.S. Says Assembly Speaker Took Millions in Payoffs, Abusing Office. New York Times. 2015 Jan 22;A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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	Surgery Today
Abbreviation	Surg. Today
ISSN (print)	0941-1291
ISSN (online)	1436-2813
Scope	General Medicine Surgery