How to format your references using the Visual Informatics citation style

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

Marwan, W., 2010. Systems biology. Amoeba-inspired network design. Science 327, 419–420.

A journal article with 2 authors

Junge, W., Rutherford, A.W., 2007. Obituary: Horst Tobias Witt (1922-2007). Nature 448, 425.

A journal article with 3 authors

Roy, S., Hsiung, F., Kornberg, T.B., 2011. Specificity of Drosophila cytonemes for distinct signaling pathways. Science 332, 354–358.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Alt, A., Lammens, K., Chiocchini, C., Lammens, A., Pieck, J.C., Kuch, D., Hopfner, K.-P., Carell, T., 2007. Bypass of DNA lesions generated during anticancer treatment with cisplatin by DNA polymerase eta. Science 318, 967–970.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Khan, M.M., Islam, M.R., 2012. Zero Waste Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Hainzelin, É. (Ed.), 2013. Cultivating Biodiversity to Transform Agriculture. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Nallagatla, V.P., Chandran, V., 2011. Sequential Fusion Using Correlated Decisions for Controlled Verification Errors, in: Real, P., Diaz-Pernil, D., Molina-Abril, H., Berciano, A., Kropatsch, W. (Eds.), Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns: 14th International Conference, CAIP 2011, Seville, Spain, August 29-31, 2011, Proceedings, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 49–56.

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 Visual Informatics.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. The Debate Over Cecil The Lion Should Be About Conservation, Not Hunting [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/debate-over-cecil-lion-should-be-about-conservation-not-hunting/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2015. Federal Student Loans: Key Weaknesses Limit Education’s Management of Contractors (No. GAO-16-196T). 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

Le, C.T., 2013. Academic performance of college students as related to depression from stress (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Hartocollis, A., David Goodman, J., 2014. The Rush to Save Rivers’s Life at a Surgery Clinic. New York Times A21.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Marwan, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Junge and Rutherford, 2007; Marwan, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Junge and Rutherford, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Alt et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Visual Informatics
ISSN (print)	2468-502X
Scope