How to format your references using the Mathematical Sciences citation style

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

Browning, J.: Recession Watch: Cut costs and sell what you can. Nature. 457, 961–962 (2009)

A journal article with 2 authors

Gurdon, J.B., Melton, D.A.: Nuclear reprogramming in cells. Science. 322, 1811–1815 (2008)

A journal article with 3 authors

Bence, N.F., Sampat, R.M., Kopito, R.R.: Impairment of the ubiquitin-proteasome system by protein aggregation. Science. 292, 1552–1555 (2001)

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kim, T.-T., Oh, S.S., Park, H.-S., Zhao, R., Kim, S.-H., Choi, W., Min, B., Hess, O.: Optical activity enhanced by strong inter-molecular coupling in planar chiral metamaterials. Sci. Rep. 4, 5864 (2014)

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Norton, L.: How to Be a Global Nonprofit. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ (2013)

An edited book

Doleželová-Velingerová, M., Wagner, R.G. eds: Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870-1930): Changing Ways of Thought. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2014)

A chapter in an edited book

Rabe, K.M., Ghosez, P.: First-Principles Studies of Ferroelectric Oxides. In: Rabe, K.M., Ahn, C.H., and Triscone, J.-M. (eds.) Physics of Ferroelectrics: A Modern Perspective. pp. 117–174. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2007)

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 Mathematical Sciences.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J.: NASA’s Upcoming Mars Rocket Completes Critical Design Review

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: Aviation Safety: Targeting and Training of FAA’s Safety Inspector Workforce. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (1996)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bissell, G.H.: Working in the transference as a multicultural intervention, (2011)

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

Sisario, B.: LCD Soundsystem Tops Album Chart, (2017)

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	Mathematical Sciences
Abbreviation	Math. Sci.
ISSN (print)	2008-1359
ISSN (online)	2251-7456
Scope