How to format your references using the System citation style

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

Barbash, D. A. (2011). Comment on “A test of the snowball theory for the rate of evolution of hybrid incompatibilities.” Science (New York, N.Y.), 333(6049), 1576; author reply 1576.

A journal article with 2 authors

Frazzetta, T. H., & Kardong, K. V. (2002). Biomechanics (Communication arising): prey attack by a large theropod dinosaur. Nature, 416(6879), 387–388.

A journal article with 3 authors

Osi, A., Butler, R. J., & Weishampel, D. B. (2010). A Late Cretaceous ceratopsian dinosaur from Europe with Asian affinities. Nature, 465(7297), 466–468.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Meng, X., Liu, D., Dai, X., Pan, H., Wen, X., Zuo, L., & Qin, G. (2014). Novel stable hard transparent conductors in TiO₂-TiC system: design materials from scratch. Scientific Reports, 4, 7503.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Carrega, P. (2010). Geographical Information and Climatology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Agrawal, A., & Britz, G. (Eds.). (2016). Pediatric Vascular Neurosurgery: Principles and Practice of Neurovascular Disorders (Part 1). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Bliem, B., & Woltran, S. (2016). Complexity of Secure Sets. In E. W. Mayr (Ed.), Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science: 41st International Workshop, WG 2015, Garching, Germany, June 17-19, 2015, Revised Papers (pp. 64–77). Springer.

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 System.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, June 22). Watch This Great Video on Why We Haven’t Made Contact with Aliens... Yet. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/watch-kurz-gesagt-video-why-we-havent-made-contact-aliensyet/

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). Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Customs Is Effectively Managing Its Year 2000 Program (T-AIMD-99-85). 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

McCorvey, Z. J. (2013). Addressing disruptive behaviors in an After School Program classroom: The effects of the Daily Behavior Report Card [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Branch, J. (2016, August 16). Olympian’s Mother Leaves a Suitcase at Check-In, and It Is Destroyed. New York Times, A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Barbash, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Barbash, 2011; Frazzetta & Kardong, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Frazzetta & Kardong, 2002)
Three authors: (Osi et al., 2010)
6 or more authors: (Meng et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	System
ISSN (print)	0346-251X
Scope	Language and Linguistics Education Linguistics and Language

Research and Writing Guides