Guide to Citing and Referencing

Introduction

 

When writing a piece of academic work, the authors must acknowledge any sources which they have used. They do this by including a brief in-text ‘citation’ within the main body of the writing, next to the material you have used. Citation and referencing in Soft Computing Journal (SCJ) are based on the IEEE style used mainly in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This style sheet gives general guidelines based on the IEEE’s citation and referencing guide.


Citation

 

The IEEE style is a numeric style, where citations are numbered in the order of appearance. This citation leads the readers to a full reference to the source in the list of references at the end of the manuscript. Each citation number should be enclosed in square brackets on the same line as the text, before any punctuation, with a space before the bracket. Once a source has been cited, the same number is re-used for all subsequent citations to the same source. Here are some examples of IEEE-style citations:

 

“... as shown by Babamir et al. [1], as previously stated.”
"The theory was first put forward in 1999 [1]."
“For more details, see [1].”
"Several recent studies [1], [4], [10], [13] have suggested that..."
“ Several studies [1]-[7] have discussed that…”

 

Page numbers are required within citations where the material is directly quoted or you refer to a specific part of the source, such as a detail difficult to find. Give page numbers within the square brackets, for example [1, p. 3].


In general, there is no need to mention the authors by name in the body of the manuscript, unless emphasis on the author(s) is warranted. It is recommended to avoid the use of titles, such as Dr., Professor, and the like. If the author(s) of a source must be mentioned whilst citing it in the text of the manuscript, and there are less than or equal to two, their name(s) can be included in the text. However, if the number of authors exceeds two, include only the name of the first author, followed by "et al." to abbreviate the remaining authors. Examples illustrating these guidelines are provided below.

 

"Babamir [1] reported that..."
"Doostali and Babamir [1] proposed a method for..."
"Babamir et al. [1] proposed a relationship..."


References

 

At the end of the manuscript, list full details of all of the sources which have been cited in the text in a section headed References, in numeric order. References listed must follow IEEE formatting guidelines. The reference list should allow anyone reading the manuscript to identify and find the material to which have been referred. In the full reference list, the authors’ names must be given. In this list, if there are six or more authors, after the name of the first author, the remaining authors can abbreviate using ‘et al.’.

 

Reference examples

 

There are standard reference formats for most types of documents. Below are examples of the most common types of documents authors might want to reference. Each of the following gives a suggested standard format for the reference followed by examples for the different document types. 

 

Book
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Author’s Surname, Book Title (italic), edition (if not first). Place of publication: Publisher, Year.
[1] I. A. Glover and P. M. Grant, Digital Communications, 3rd ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2009.

 

Book chapter 
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Author’s Surname, “Title of chapter in book,” in Book Title (italic), edition (if not first), Editor’s initials. Editor’s Surname, Ed. Place of publication: Publisher, Year, page numbers.
[2] C. W. Li and G. J. Wang, "MEMS manufacturing techniques for tissue scaffolding devices," in Mems for Biomedical Applications, S. Bhansali and A. Vasudev, Eds. Cambridge: Woodhead, 2012, pp. 192-217.

 

Journal article 
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Author’s Surname, “Title of article,” Title of journal abbreviated in Italics, vol. number, issue number, page numbers, Abbreviated Month Year.
[4] F. Yan, Y. Gu, Y. Wang, C. M. Wang, X. Y. Hu, H. X. Peng, et al., "Study on the interaction mechanism between laser and rock during perforation," Optics and Laser Technology, vol. 54, pp. 303-308, Dec 2013.
Note: the above example article is from a journal which does not use issue numbers, so they are not included in the reference.

 

Conference paper 
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Author’s Surname, “Title of paper,” in Name of Conference, Location, Year, pp. xxx.
[6] S. Adachi, T. Horio, and T. Suzuki. "Intense vacuum-ultraviolet single-order harmonic pulse by a deep-ultraviolet driving laser," in Conf. Lasers and Electro-Optics, San Jose, CA, 2012, pp.2118-2120.

 

Theses/Dissertations 
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Author’s Surname, “Title of thesis,” Designation type, Abbrev. Dept., Abbrev. Univ., City of Univ., State, Year.
[10] J. O. Williams, “Narrow-band analyser,” Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. Elect. Eng., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, 1993.

 

Websites
[Ref number] Author’s initials. Authors Surname. (Year, Month. Day). Title of web page [Online]. Available: URL
[14] Cadp. (2019, May. 26 ). Cadp-tools [Online]. Available: https://cadp.inria.fr/tools.html.

 

Note: Use of the DOI is highly encouraged. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it as a permanent link to any electronic article. Here is an eaxmple:

[2] S. Doostali and S. M. Babamir, "An energy efficient cluster head selection approach for performance improvement in network-coding-based wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks," Computer Communications, vol. 164, 188-200, 2020, doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2020.10.014.

 

Note: For Persian studies, if the English translation is used in the references section, the word "[In Persian]" must be mentioned at the end of it. For example

[1] N. Zahiri, S. M. Babamir, "A method to simplify patterns in web services compositions and select optimal probabilistic composition," Soft Computing Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 44-71, 2021, doi: 10.22052/SCJ.2021.243188.1003 [In Persian].


For more details, see : https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/IEEE-Reference-Guide.pdf.