How to format your references using the System citation style

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

Triendl, R. (2002). Interaction required. Nature, 415(6870), 7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Halloran, M. E., & Longini, I. M., Jr. (2006). Public health. Community studies for vaccinating schoolchildren against influenza. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5761), 615–616.

A journal article with 3 authors

Desai, S. A., Bezrukov, S. M., & Zimmerberg, J. (2000). A voltage-dependent channel involved in nutrient uptake by red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite. Nature, 406(6799), 1001–1005.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Costello, E. K., Lauber, C. L., Hamady, M., Fierer, N., Gordon, J. I., & Knight, R. (2009). Bacterial community variation in human body habitats across space and time. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326(5960), 1694–1697.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sab, K., & Lebée, A. (2015). Homogenization of Heterogeneous Thin and Thick Plates. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Oertli, D., & Udelsman, R. (Eds.). (2007). Surgery of the Thyroid and Parathyroid Glands. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Schaathun, H. G., & Cohen, G. D. (2005). A Trellis-Based Bound on (2,1)-Separating Codes. In N. P. Smart (Ed.), Cryptography and Coding: 10th IMA International Conference, Cirencester, UK, December 19-21, 2005. Proceedings (pp. 59–67). Springer.

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 System.

Blog post

Andrew, D. (2016, June 29). Why Having Thoughts That Aren’t Yours Doesn’t Make You Delusional. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/why-having-thoughts-that-arent-yours-doesnt-make-you-delusional/

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. (1998). Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Avoiding Major Disruptions Will Require Strong Leadership and Effective Partnerships (T-AIMD-98-267). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Dimick, K. E. (2009). Response to Intervention research to practice: Exploring a school in transition—a case study [Doctoral dissertation]. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Schmitt, E., Gordon, M. R., & Sengupta, S. (2016, September 20). U.S. Ties Russia to Strike on U.N. Convoy in Syria. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Triendl, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Halloran & Longini, 2006; Triendl, 2002).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Halloran & Longini, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Costello et al., 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	System
ISSN (print)	0346-251X
Scope	Language and Linguistics Education Linguistics and Language