How to format your references using the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Mass Spectrometry. 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]

M. Weinreich, Molecular biology: DNA replication reconstructed, Nature 519 (2015) 418–419.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

T. Maniatis, B. Tasic, Alternative pre-mRNA splicing and proteome expansion in metazoans, Nature 418 (2002) 236–243.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

D.E. Canfield, A.N. Glazer, P.G. Falkowski, The evolution and future of Earth’s nitrogen cycle, Science 330 (2010) 192–196.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

Y.T. Kwon, A.S. Kashina, I.V. Davydov, R.-G. Hu, J.Y. An, J.W. Seo, F. Du, A. Varshavsky, An essential role of N-terminal arginylation in cardiovascular development, Science 297 (2002) 96–99.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.L. Dexter, Monitoring and Control of Information-Poor Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

E.M. Duarte, ed., Being and Learning: A Poetic Phenomenology of Education, SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M.Y. Henein, M. Sheppard, J.R. Pepper, M. Rigby, Pulmonary Valve, in: M.Y. Henein (Ed.), Clinical Echocardiography, Springer, London, 2012: pp. 81–92.

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 International Journal of Mass Spectrometry.

Blog post

[1]

K. Hamilton, A 700,000-Year-Old Fossil Find Shows The Hobbits’ Ancestors Were Even Smaller, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/a-700000-year-old-fossil-find-shows-the-hobbits-ancestors-were-even-smaller/ (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, Basic Agreements With Educational Institutions or Nonprofit Organizations for Award of Research and Development Contracts, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1980.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. Parihar, Characterization of the Natural Killer Cell Cytokine Response to Antibody-Coated Tumor Cells, Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004.

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]

G. Vecsey, Summoning Another Storm, New York Times (2011) D8.

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	International Journal of Mass Spectrometry
Abbreviation	Int. J. Mass Spectrom.
ISSN (print)	1387-3806
Scope	Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Spectroscopy Condensed Matter Physics Instrumentation