How to format your references using the Systematic Reviews citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Systematic Reviews. 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. Garwin L. Schrödinger’s mousetrap. Part 4. Nature. 2005;433:579.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Pörtner HO, Knust R. Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance. Science. 2007;315:95–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Tarchini B, Duboule D, Kmita M. Regulatory constraints in the evolution of the tetrapod limb anterior-posterior polarity. Nature. 2006;443:985–8.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Rao Z, Chen F, Cheng H, Liu W, Wang G, Lai Z, et al. High-resolution summer precipitation variations in the western Chinese Loess Plateau during the last glacial. Sci Rep. 2013;3:2785.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Yavaş M. Applied English Phonology. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2011.

An edited book

1. Kerr H, Lemmings D, Phiddian R, editors. Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK; 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Andreo RB. Bringing Out Faint Large-Scale Structure. In: Gendler R, editor. Lessons from the Masters: Current Concepts in Astronomical Image Processing. New York, NY: Springer; 2013. p. 97–113.

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 Systematic Reviews.

Blog post

1. Carpineti A. Researchers Have Discovered An Ancient Defence Mechanism Inside The Great Pyramid Of Giza. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016.

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. Technology Selection at INS Needs Improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1988 May. Report No.: T-PEMD-88-6.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Belletti A. Trumpet Practice: Habits and Goals [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2017.

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. Kelly H. Mother’s Disapproval. New York Times. 2015 Aug 16;BR14.

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	Systematic Reviews
Abbreviation	Syst. Rev.
ISSN (online)	2046-4053
Scope	Medicine (miscellaneous)