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]

W.G. Hill, Genetics. A century of corn selection, Science 307 (2005) 683–684.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

H. Makinoshima, M.S. Glickman, Regulation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis cell envelope composition and virulence by intramembrane proteolysis, Nature 436 (2005) 406–409.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

R. Ranganathan, S.C. Cannon, H.R. Horvitz, MOD-1 is a serotonin-gated chloride channel that modulates locomotory behaviour in C. elegans, Nature 408 (2000) 470–475.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D.T. Johnston, B.A. Wing, J. Farquhar, A.J. Kaufman, H. Strauss, T.W. Lyons, L.C. Kah, D.E. Canfield, Active microbial sulfur disproportionation in the Mesoproterozoic, Science 310 (2005) 1477–1479.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

H. Geman, Agricultural Finance, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2015.

An edited book

[1]

M. Archibald, V. Brattka, V. Goranko, B. Löwe, eds., Infinity in Logic and Computation: International Conference, ILC 2007, Cape Town, South Africa, November 3-5, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

F. Capasso, Controllo di qualità delle droghe vegetali, in: F. Capasso (Ed.), Farmacognosia: Botanica, Chimica e Farmacologia Delle Piante Medicinali, Springer, Milano, 2011: pp. 39–45.

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]

D. Andrew, “Middle Child Syndrome” Isn’t What You Think — Here’s What It Really Means, IFLScience (2017).

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, Distance Education: Growth in Distance Education Programs and Implications for Federal Education Policy, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2002.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

P.K. Zurheide, Hydromorphology of anomalous bright loamy soils on the mid-Atlantic coastal plain, Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.

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]

D.T. Carter, What Donald Trump Owes George Wallace, New York Times (2016) SR6.

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