How to format your references using the Theoretical Computer Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Theoretical Computer Science. 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

[1]

P. Smaglik, State of the unions, Nature 428 (2004) 965.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M. Joanicot, A. Ajdari, Applied physics. Droplet control for microfluidics, Science 309 (2005) 887–888.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

C. Dulac, L.A. O’Connell, Z. Wu, Neural control of maternal and paternal behaviors, Science 345 (2014) 765–770.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

K.M. Hoffmeister, E.C. Josefsson, N.A. Isaac, H. Clausen, J.H. Hartwig, T.P. Stossel, Glycosylation restores survival of chilled blood platelets, Science 301 (2003) 1531–1534.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

E.E. Yaacoub, Z. Dawy, Resource Allocation in Uplink OFDMA Wireless Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

A. Chella, R. Pirrone, R. Sorbello, K.R. Jóhannsdóttir, eds., Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2012: Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

P.J. Reddy, K. Gollapalli, S. Ghantasala, T. Das, S.K. Patel, V. Chanukuppa, S. Srivastava, S. Rapole, Basics of Mass Spectrometry and Its Applications in Biomarker Discovery, in: S. Srivastava (Ed.), Biomarker Discovery in the Developing World: Dissecting the Pipeline for Meeting the Challenges, Springer India, New Delhi, 2016: pp. 41–63.

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 Theoretical Computer Science.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Experimental Greenhouses Grow Strawberries Underwater, IFLScience (2015).

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, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

F.-Y. Shen, A pedagogical and analytic comparison of Auguste Franchomme’s twelve Caprices, op. 7 and Alfredo Piatti’s twelve Caprices, op. 25, Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 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]

J. Kerry, What We Got Right, New York Times (2017) A27.

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	Theoretical Computer Science
Abbreviation	Theor. Comput. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0304-3975
Scope	General Computer Science Theoretical Computer Science