How to format your references using the Requirements Engineering citation style

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

Yaalon DH (2000) Down to earth. Nature 407:301

A journal article with 2 authors

Langer R, Tirrell DA (2004) Designing materials for biology and medicine. Nature 428:487–492

A journal article with 3 authors

Verbiscer AJ, Skrutskie MF, Hamilton DP (2009) Saturn’s largest ring. Nature 461:1098–1100

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Brass AL, Dykxhoorn DM, Benita Y, et al (2008) Identification of host proteins required for HIV infection through a functional genomic screen. Science 319:921–926

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Holzman G CVT VTS De, Raffel T CVT VTS Su (2015) Surgical Patient Care for Veterinary Technicians and Nurses. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Klees SJ, Samoff J, Stromquist NP (2012) The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives. SensePublishers, Rotterdam

A chapter in an edited book

Henriksen FL, Schorling P, Hansen B, et al (2014) FirstAED Emergency Dispatch, Global Positioning of First Responders with Distinct Roles - A Solution to Reduce the Response Times and Ensuring Early Defibrillation in the Rural Area Langeland. In: Saranto K, Castrén M, Kuusela T, et al (eds) Safe and Secure Cities: 5th International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society, WIS 2014, Turku, Finland, August 18-20, 2014. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 36–45

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 Requirements Engineering.

Blog post

Andrews R (2016) ExxonMobil Shareholders Demand Action On Climate Change. In: IFLScience. 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 (1995) Student Loan Defaults: Department of Education Limitations in Sanctioning Problem Schools. 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

ELBoushi TC (2010) Evaluating ethics training and the outcome on leadership decision making: A phenomenological study. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

Southall A, McKINLEY JC Jr (2017) ‘I Only Wanted to Scare Them.’ New York Times MB1

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	Requirements Engineering
ISSN (print)	0947-3602
ISSN (online)	1432-010X
Scope	Information Systems Software