How to format your references using the Information and Software Technology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Information and Software Technology. 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]

E. Ott, Obituary: Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008), Nature 453 (2008) 300.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A.S. Shaw, Y. Huang, Immunology. CAR’ing for the skin, Science 329 (2010) 1154–1155.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

V. Srinivasan, A.J. Pierik, R. Lill, Crystal structures of nucleotide-free and glutathione-bound mitochondrial ABC transporter Atm1, Science 343 (2014) 1137–1140.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

F. Esashi, N. Christ, J. Gannon, Y. Liu, T. Hunt, M. Jasin, S.C. West, CDK-dependent phosphorylation of BRCA2 as a regulatory mechanism for recombinational repair, Nature 434 (2005) 598–604.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D.A. Wilson, Interpreting Land Records, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2014.

An edited book

[1]

A.S. Cherny, Singular Stochastic Differential Equations, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J.-L. Danger, S. Guilley, L. Barthe, P. Benoit, Countermeasures Against Physical Attacks in FPGAs, in: B. Badrignans, J.L. Danger, V. Fischer, G. Gogniat, L. Torres (Eds.), Security Trends for FPGAS: From Secured to Secure Reconfigurable Systems, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011: pp. 73–100.

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 Information and Software Technology.

Blog post

[1]

C. Carpineti, This Is What Aliens Might Look Like If They Evolved On A Planet That Orbits A Red Dwarf Star, IFLScience (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/this-is-what-aliens-might-look-like-if-they-evolved-on-a-planet-that-orbits-a-red-dwarf-star/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Review of Certain Activities of the Kentucky Equine Education Programs, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1974.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

L.W. Bristow, There is an old woman: The final stage of individuation, Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2009.

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]

J. Williams, Reading by Numbers, New York Times (2017) BR4.

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	Information and Software Technology
Abbreviation	Inf. Softw. Technol.
ISSN (print)	0950-5849
Scope	Computer Science Applications Information Systems Software