How to format your references using the Digital Investigation citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Digital Investigation. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Bowerman, B., 2008. Cell signaling. Wnt moves beyond the canon. Science 320, 327–328.

A journal article with 2 authors

Waitukaitis, S.R., Jaeger, H.M., 2012. Impact-activated solidification of dense suspensions via dynamic jamming fronts. Nature 487, 205–209.

A journal article with 3 authors

Serganov, A., Huang, L., Patel, D.J., 2008. Structural insights into amino acid binding and gene control by a lysine riboswitch. Nature 455, 1263–1267.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kolodkin-Gal, I., Hazan, R., Gaathon, A., Carmeli, S., Engelberg-Kulka, H., 2007. A linear pentapeptide is a quorum-sensing factor required for mazEF-mediated cell death in Escherichia coli. Science 318, 652–655.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jain, R.K., Triandis, H.C., Weick, C.W., 2010. Managing Research, Development, and Innovation. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Abbott, L.K., Murphy, D.V. (Eds.), 2007. Soil Biological Fertility: A Key to Sustainable Land Use in Agriculture. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Kleanthous, S., Christophorou, C., Tsiourti, C., Dantas, C., Wintjens, R., Samaras, G., Christodoulou, E., 2016. Analysis of Elderly Users’ Preferences and Expectations on Service Robot’s Personality, Appearance and Interaction, in: Zhou, J., Salvendy, G. (Eds.), Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Healthy and Active Aging: Second International Conference, ITAP 2016, Held as Part of HCI International 2016 Toronto, ON, Canada, July 17–22, 2016, Proceedings, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 35–44.

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 Digital Investigation.

Blog post

Luntz, S., 2015. Dark Matter Might Not Be As Dark As We Thought [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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. Transportation Security: Federal Action Needed to Help Address Security Challenges (No. GAO-03-843). 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

Danso Odei, P.K., 2017. Effective Resolution of The Bibiani-Anhwianso-Bekwai District Healthcare Delivery System: An Outcome-Based Evaluative Case (Doctoral dissertation). Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

Scott, M., Kanter, J., 2016. E.U. Ruling Said to Aim at Tax Policy for Apple. 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 (Bowerman, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Bowerman, 2008; Waitukaitis and Jaeger, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Waitukaitis and Jaeger, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Kolodkin-Gal et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Digital Investigation
ISSN (print)	1742-2876
Scope	Computer Science Applications Law Medical Laboratory Technology