How to format your references using the The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. 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]

S. Solomon, The hole truth, Nature 427 (2004) 289–291.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S.J. Mojzsis, T.M. Harrison, Origin and significance of Archean quartzose rocks at Akilia, Greenland, Science 298 (2002) 917; discussion 917.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

I. Koren, G. Dagan, O. Altaratz, From aerosol-limited to invigoration of warm convective clouds, Science 344 (2014) 1143–1146.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Y. Lang, F. del Monte, B.J. Rodriguez, P. Dockery, D.P. Finn, A. Pandit, Integration of TiO2 into the diatom Thalassiosira weissflogii during frustule synthesis, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 3205.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M.A. Maksoud, Quick Reference to Dental Implant Surgery, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2017.

An edited book

[1]

J. Langhorne, ed., Immunology and Immunopathogenesis of Malaria, 297th ed., Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Mandow, J.L.P. de la Cruz, A Memory-Efficient Search Strategy for Multiobjective Shortest Path Problems, in: B. Mertsching, M. Hund, Z. Aziz (Eds.), KI 2009: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 32nd Annual German Conference on AI, Paderborn, Germany, September 15-18, 2009. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009: pp. 25–32.

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 Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, Why You Should Always Order The Bigger Pizza, According To Mathematics, 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, Federal Research: Interim Assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research and Technology Transfer Programs, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J. Acosta, Building bridges: A specialized training program for professionals in school settings to address bullying in LGBTQ youth: A grant proposal, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2013.

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]

G. Vecsey, Petke Departs, Certain He Gave All That He Could, New York Times (2010) SP9.

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	The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety
ISSN (print)	1553-7250
Scope