How to format your references using the Review of Scientific Instruments citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Review of Scientific Instruments. 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 R. Stone, “U.S.-RUSSIA TIES: Spy Conviction Strains Science Collaborations,” Science 290(5499), 2043–2045 (2000).

A journal article with 2 authors

¹ D. Kaminski, and C. Geisler, “Survival analysis of faculty retention in science and engineering by gender,” Science 335(6070), 864–866 (2012).

A journal article with 3 authors

¹ X. Xu, Z. Zhou, and X. Wang, “The smallest known non-avian theropod dinosaur,” Nature 408(6813), 705–708 (2000).

A journal article with 4 or more authors

¹ S. Coe, W.-K. Woo, M. Bawendi, and V. Bulović, “Electroluminescence from single monolayers of nanocrystals in molecular organic devices,” Nature 420(6917), 800–803 (2002).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

¹ E. Exposito, Advanced Transport Protocols (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA, 2012).

An edited book

¹ S. Tsang, and H. Men, editors , China in the Xi Jinping Era (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016).

A chapter in an edited book

¹ R. Jammazi, “Oil Shock Transmission to Stock Market Returns: Wavelet-Multivariate Markov Switching GARCH Approach,” in The Interrelationship Between Financial and Energy Markets, edited by S. Ramos and H. Veiga, (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014), pp. 71–111.

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 Review of Scientific Instruments.

Blog post

¹ E. Andrew, “Waste Disposal In US Landfills Underestimated By 115%,” IFLScience, (2015).

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, FASAB Volume 1 Original Statements: Statements of Federal Financial Accounting Concepts and Standards (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

¹ A.M. Black, Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Ohio Statewide Agricultural Leadership Program, Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006.

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 S. Kishkovsky, “Russian Troops Seal Off Town In Search for Chechen Rebels,” New York Times, 13 (2002).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Review of Scientific Instruments
Abbreviation	Rev. Sci. Instrum.
ISSN (print)	0034-6748
ISSN (online)	1089-7623
Scope	Instrumentation