How to format your references using the Health Research Policy and Systems citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Health Research Policy and Systems. 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

1. Howard AW. Observed properties of extrasolar planets. Science. 2013;340:572–6.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Hermisson J, McGregor AP. Pleiotropic scaling and QTL data. Nature. 2008;456:E3; discussion E4.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Cohn A, Fehr E, Maréchal MA. Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry. Nature. 2014;516:86–9.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Aluwihare LI, Repeta DJ, Pantoja S, Johnson CG. Two chemically distinct pools of organic nitrogen accumulate in the ocean. Science. 2005;308:1007–10.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Stone R, Gutiérrez-Albilla JD. A Companion to Luis Buñuel. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd; 2013.

An edited book

1. Skorupa W, Schmidt H, editors. Subsecond Annealing of Advanced Materials: Annealing by Lasers, Flash Lamps and Swift Heavy Ions. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Gan L-S, Lee FW, Nagaraja N, Li P, Labutti J, Yin W, et al. Case History — Use of ADME Studies for Optimization of Drug Candidates. In: Borchardt RT, Kerns EH, Hageman MJ, Thakker DR, Stevens JL, editors. Optimizing the “Drug-Like” Properties of Leads in Drug Discovery. New York, NY: Springer; 2006. p. 81–97.

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 Health Research Policy and Systems.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. Number-Crunching Higgs Boson: Meet The World’s Largest Distributed Computer Grid. IFLScience. IFLScience; 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

1. Government Accountability Office. Status Report on Executive Branch Implementation of the National Materials and Minerals Policy, Research and Development Act of 1980. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1981 Nov. Report No.: EMD-82-27.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Solorzano E. A mindfulness-based psycho-educational group for caregivers of older adults: A grant proposal [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2014.

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

1. Hannibal ME. Why the Beaver Should Thank the Wolf. New York Times. 2012 Sep 29;A23.

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	Health Research Policy and Systems
Abbreviation	Health Res. Policy Syst.
ISSN (online)	1478-4505
Scope	Health Policy