How to format your references using the Pituitary citation style

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

Lingham-Soliar T (2014) Comment on “A Jurassic ornithischian dinosaur from Siberia with both feathers and scales.” Science 346:434

A journal article with 2 authors

Wang L, Sigworth FJ (2009) Structure of the BK potassium channel in a lipid membrane from electron cryomicroscopy. Nature 461:292–295

A journal article with 3 authors

Mei T-S, Patel HH, Sigman MS (2014) Enantioselective construction of remote quaternary stereocentres. Nature 508:340–344

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Quan B, Yu S-H, Chung DY, et al (2014) Single source precursor-based solvothermal synthesis of heteroatom-doped graphene and its energy storage and conversion applications. Sci Rep 4:5639

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Mastro PF (2016) Plastics Product Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Zhou Z-H, Li H, Yang Q (2007) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 11th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2007, Nanjing, China, May 22-25, 2007. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Margolis RL, Rudnicki DD (2008) Huntington’s Disease-Like 2. In: Walker RH, Saiki S, Danek A (eds) Neuroacanthocytosis Syndromes II. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 59–73

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 Pituitary.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Could Plastic “Lego” Roads Pave The Way To A Greener Future? In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/could-plastic-lego-roads-pave-way-greener-future/. 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 (1983) Small Computers in the Federal Government: Management Is Needed To Realize Potential and Prevent Problems. 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

Griffin MG (2008) The lived experience of first line managers during planned organizational change: A phenomenological study of one firm in the residential construction industry. 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

Mueller B (2015) $25,000 Fine Proposed in Taxi’s Snub of Family. New York Times A21

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	Pituitary
Abbreviation	Pituitary
ISSN (print)	1386-341X
ISSN (online)	1573-7403
Scope	Endocrinology Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism