How to format your references using the European Union - Interinstitutional Style Guide (author-date) citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for European Union - Interinstitutional Style Guide (author-date). 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 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

Smaglik, P., ‘Cultivating Black Gold’, Nature, Vol. 433, No. 7027, February 17, 2005, p. 779.

A journal article with 2 authors

Jiang, J.-H., and S. John, ‘Photonic Architectures for Equilibrium High-Temperature Bose-Einstein Condensation in Dichalcogenide Monolayers’, Scientific Reports, Vol. 4, December 11, 2014, p. 7432.

A journal article with 3 authors

Meng, F., K.P. McGrath, and A.H. Hoveyda, ‘Multifunctional Organoboron Compounds for Scalable Natural Product Synthesis’, Nature, Vol. 513, No. 7518, September 18, 2014, pp. 367–374.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Liu, Y., P.G. Jessop, M. Cunningham, C.A. Eckert, and C.L. Liotta, ‘Switchable Surfactants’, Science (New York, N.Y.), Vol. 313, No. 5789, August 18, 2006, pp. 958–960.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Laykin, E., Investigative Computer Forensics, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2013.

An edited book

An, Aijun, Stan Matwin, Zbigniew W. Raś, and Dominik Ślęzak, eds., Foundations of Intelligent Systems: 17th International Symposium, ISMIS 2008 Toronto, Canada, May 20-23, 2008 Proceedings, Vol. 4994, Vol. 4994, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

Sherr, M., M. Blaze, and B.T. Loo, ‘Scalable Link-Based Relay Selection for Anonymous Routing’, in I. Goldberg and M.J. Atallah (eds.), Privacy Enhancing Technologies: 9th International Symposium, PETS 2009, Seattle, WA, USA, August 5-7, 2009. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009, pp. 73–93.

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 European Union - Interinstitutional Style Guide (author-date).

Blog post

Luntz, S., ‘Farmer Finds Enormous Prehistoric Sea Monster Jaw’, IFLScience, IFLScience, April 28, 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

Government Accountability Office, Community-Based Correctional Programs Can Do More To Help Offenders, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, February 15, 1980.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bakirci, A., ‘Proteomic Analysis of Hepatocyte Proteins in Response to in Vivo Iron Overload’, Doctoral dissertation, 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., ‘SHADOWS OF DOUBT’, New York Times, April 14, 2011.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik, 2005; Jiang and John, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Jiang and John, 2014)
Three authors: (Meng, McGrath, and Hoveyda, 2014)
4 or more authors: (Liu et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	European Union - Interinstitutional Style Guide (author-date)
ISSN (print)	1831-5380
Scope