Citation styles take the metadata of any given reference (authors, title, etc.) and display this information according to the rules of the style. For example, if your reference has 10 authors, but the journal you’re submitting to requires the first 3 authors to be displayed followed by et al, using the correct style will do this for you automatically – no need to edit the reference metadata in most cases. In fact, we recommend that you have complete metadata for all references, and let the style do the work for you.
How do citation styles work?
