How to format your references using the World Wide Web citation style

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

Bucksbaum, P.H.: Chemistry. The first femtosecond in the life of a chemical reaction. Science. 312, 373–374 (2006)

A journal article with 2 authors

Geissler, P.W., Okwaro, F.: Developing world: Discuss inequality. Nature. 513, 303 (2014)

A journal article with 3 authors

Xu, L., Li, X.-Q., Sun, Q.-F.: Revisit the spin-FET: multiple reflection, inelastic scattering, and lateral size effects. Sci. Rep. 4, 7527 (2014)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Lin, W., Frère, C.H., Karczmarski, L., Xia, J., Gui, D., Wu, Y.: Phylogeography of the finless porpoise (genus Neophocaena): testing the stepwise divergence hypothesis in the northwestern Pacific. Sci. Rep. 4, 6572 (2014)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dijksterhuis, G.B.: Multivariate Data Analysis in Sensory and Consumer Science. Food & Nutrition Press, Inc., Trumbull, Connecticut, USA (2008)

An edited book

Sheehan, W.: Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End. Springer, New York, NY (2015)

A chapter in an edited book

Achterbergh, J., Vriens, D.: Epilogue to Part I: The Two “Archai” Combined. In: Vriens, D. (ed.) Organizations: Social Systems Conducting Experiments. pp. 167–177. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2010)

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 World Wide Web.

Blog post

Hamilton, K.: How To Win At Rock-Paper-Scissors With Science

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: Costs and Uses of Remote Sensing Satellites. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1983)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Boudreau, P.D.: Orthogonality in Natural Products Workflows, (2015)

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

Brantley, B.: Curtain’s Up. Adulthood Can Wait, (2017)

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	World Wide Web
Abbreviation	World Wide Web
ISSN (print)	1386-145X
ISSN (online)	1573-1413
Scope	Computer Networks and Communications Hardware and Architecture Software