How to format your references using the The Surgeon citation style

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

Dennis C. Small RNAs: the genome’s guiding hand? Nature. 2002;420(6917):732.

A journal article with 2 authors

Viswanathan M, Guarente L. Regulation of Caenorhabditis elegans lifespan by sir-2.1 transgenes. Nature. 2011 Sep 21;477(7365):E1-2.

A journal article with 3 authors

Beeli G, Esslen M, Jäncke L. Synaesthesia: when coloured sounds taste sweet. Nature. 2005 Mar 3;434(7029):38.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Feinerman O, Veiga J, Dorfman JR, Germain RN, Altan-Bonnet G. Variability and robustness in T cell activation from regulated heterogeneity in protein levels. Science. 2008 Aug 22;321(5892):1081–4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cobb AH, Reade JPH. Herbicides and Plant Physiology. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010.

An edited book

Tazreiter C. Fluid Security in the Asia Pacific: Transnational Lives, Human Rights and State Control. 1st ed. 2016. Weber L, Pickering S, Segrave M, McKernan H, editors. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK; 2016. XVIII, 276 p. 3 illus. in color. (Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security).

A chapter in an edited book

Liu Y, Veksler O, Juan O. Simulating Classic Mosaics with Graph Cuts. In: Yuille AL, Zhu SC, Cremers D, Wang Y, editors. Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition: 6th International Conference, EMMCVPR 2007, Ezhou, China, August 27-29, 2007 Proceedings. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007. p. 55–70. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science).

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 Surgeon.

Blog post

Andrews R. Astronomy Student Discovers “Warm Neptune” Exoplanet Within Habitable Zone. 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

Government Accountability Office. Weather Forecasting: Cost Growth and Delays in Billion-Dollar Weather Service Modernization. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1991 Dec. Report No.: IMTEC-92-12FS.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Joshi RA. Adaptive nulling in multiple beam antennas using quantized state adaptive algorithms [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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

Vecsey G. Gathering in the Boss’s Office, This Time to Honor Him. New York Times. 2010 Sep 21;B17.

In-text citations

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

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 Surgeon
Abbreviation	Surgeon
ISSN (print)	1479-666X
Scope	Surgery