How to format your references using the The American Surgeon citation style

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

Tabashnik BE. Plant science. Communal benefits of transgenic corn. Science. 2010 Oct 8;330(6001):189–90.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gano S, Kinzler R. SPORE series winner. Bringing the museum into the classroom. Science. 2011 Feb 25;331(6020):1028–9.

A journal article with 3 authors

Couch S, Sparks RS, Carroll MR. Mineral disequilibrium in lavas explained by convective self-mixing in open magma chambers. Nature. 2001 Jun 28;411(6841):1037–9.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Li HM, Lee DY, Choi MS, Qu D, Liu X, Ra CH, et al. Metal-semiconductor barrier modulation for high photoresponse in transition metal dichalcogenide field effect transistors. Sci Rep. 2014 Feb 10;4:4041.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rowe P. Essential Statistics for the Pharmaceutical Sciences. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2015.

An edited book

Bredies K, Clason C, Kunisch K, Winckel G von, editors. Control and Optimization with PDE Constraints. Basel: Springer; 2013. X, 215 p. 43 illus., 29 illus. in color. (International Series of Numerical Mathematics; vol. 164).

A chapter in an edited book

Lee DS, Yadav JS. Carotid Angioplasty and Stenting Trials. In: Saw J, Exaire JE, Lee DS, Yadav JS, editors. Handbook Of Complex Percutaneous Carotid Intervention. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press; 2007. p. 47–63.

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 The American Surgeon.

Blog post

Luntz S. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016. Two Comets For New Year’s Eve.

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. Information Technology: Selected Agencies’ Use of Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software for Human Resources Functions. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2000 Jul. Report No.: AIMD-00-270.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tseng YHH. Motivation of participation in inservice training based on problem solving: A modified Delphi study [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

Schwartz J, Schlossberg T. Little Debating a Climate Divide. New York Times. 2016 Oct 17;D5.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	The American Surgeon
ISSN (print)	0003-1348
ISSN (online)	1555-9823
Scope