How to format your references using the Experimental Techniques citation style

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

Boyer P (2008) Being human: Religion: bound to believe? Nature 455:1038–1039

A journal article with 2 authors

Wilson PA, Norris RD (2001) Warm tropical ocean surface and global anoxia during the mid-Cretaceous period. Nature 412:425–429

A journal article with 3 authors

Perrin RJ, Fagan AM, Holtzman DM (2009) Multimodal techniques for diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Nature 461:916–922

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Scheffler M, Dressel M, Jourdan M, Adrian H (2005) Extremely slow Drude relaxation of correlated electrons. Nature 438:1135–1137

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cherian A (2015) Energy and Global Climate Change. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Deeg K-H (2015) Doppler Sonography in Infancy and Childhood. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Krishans Z, Mutule A, Merkuryev Y, Oleinikova I (2011) Optimal Initial States Method. In: Mutule A, Merkuryev Y, Oleinikova I (eds) Dynamic Management of Sustainable Development: Methods for Large Technical Systems. Springer, London, pp 45–56

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 Experimental Techniques.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Human Head Transplants Could Become A Reality By 2017. In: IFLScience. 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 (2009) Commercial Space Transportation: Development of the Commercial Space Launch Industry Presents Safety Oversight Challenges for FAA and Raises Issues Affecting Federal Roles. 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

Swofford DM (2009) Impact of a pharmaceutical company’s leadership development program on participant leadership behavior. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University

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

Shpigel B (2016) Pro Football; Bowles Hospitalized, and He May Not Coach. New York Times D4

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	Experimental Techniques
Abbreviation	Exp. Tech.
ISSN (print)	0732-8818
ISSN (online)	1747-1567
Scope	Mechanical Engineering Mechanics of Materials