How to format your references using the TOP citation style

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

Amigo I (2015) Science made me a better parent. Science 350:1286

A journal article with 2 authors

Hibbs RE, Gouaux E (2011) Principles of activation and permeation in an anion-selective Cys-loop receptor. Nature 474:54–60

A journal article with 3 authors

Kim S, Ubel P, De Vries R (2009) Pruning the regulatory tree. Nature 457:534–535

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Song MS, Salmena L, Carracedo A, et al (2008) The deubiquitinylation and localization of PTEN are regulated by a HAUSP-PML network. Nature 455:813–817

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Shelby AM, McKune CM (2014) Small Animal Anesthesia Techniques. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Wang J (ed) (2014) Proceedings of the First Symposium on Aviation Maintenance and Management-Volume I. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Grimes A, Grinter RE (2007) Designing Persuasion: Health Technology for Low-Income African American Communities. In: Kort Y de, IJsselsteijn W, Midden C, et al. (eds) Persuasive Technology: Second International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2007, Palo Alto, CA, USA, April 26-27, 2007, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 24–35

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 TOP.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) New Radar Scan Says Tutankhamun’s Tomb Has No Hidden Chamber. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/new-radar-scan-says-tutankhamun-tomb-has-no-hidden-chamber/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (2003) FAA Purchase Cards: Weak Controls Resulted in Instances of Improper and Wasteful Purchases and Missing Assets. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hernandez I (2017) Strong-DISM: A First Attempt to a Dynamically Typed Assembly Language (D-TAL). Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida

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

Saulny S (2004) Club’s Owner And 2 Others Arrested in Raid. New York Times B1

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Amigo 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Hibbs and Gouaux 2011; Amigo 2015).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Hibbs and Gouaux 2011)
Three or more authors: (Song et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	TOP
Abbreviation	TOP
ISSN (print)	1134-5764
ISSN (online)	1863-8279
Scope	Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics Statistics and Probability