How to format your references using the Human Nature citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Human Nature. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Webster, P. J. (2013). Meteorology: Improve weather forecasts for the developing world. Nature, 493(7430), 17–19.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wilkinson, K., & Hershko, A. (2015). Irwin Allan Rose (1926-2015). Nature, 523(7562), 532.

A journal article with 3 authors

Matsumoto, K., Suzuki, W., & Tanaka, K. (2003). Neuronal correlates of goal-based motor selection in the prefrontal cortex. Science (New York, N.Y.), 301(5630), 229–232.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Fairén, A. G., Fernández-Remolar, D., Dohm, J. M., Baker, V. R., & Amils, R. (2004). Inhibition of carbonate synthesis in acidic oceans on early Mars. Nature, 431(7007), 423–426.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bar-Eli, M., Plessner, H., & Raab, M. (2011). Judgement, Decision Making and Success in Sport. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

David, K., Geihs, K., Leimeister, J. M., Roßnagel, A., Schmidt, L., Stumme, G., & Wacker, A. (Eds.). (2014). Socio-technical Design of Ubiquitous Computing Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Chen, J., Su, G., He, J., & Ben, S. (2010). Face Image Relighting using Locally Constrained Global Optimization. In K. Daniilidis, P. Maragos, & N. Paragios (Eds.), Computer Vision – ECCV 2010: 11th European Conference on Computer Vision, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 5-11, 2010, Proceedings, Part IV (pp. 44–57). Berlin, Heidelberg: 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 Human Nature.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015, October 15). How Chameleons Adapted To A Tree-Climbing Lifestyle. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-chameleons-adapted-tree-climbing-lifestyle/. Accessed 30 October 2018

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. (1972). Identification of NASA Research and Development Programs Subject to Benefit-Cost Analysis (No. B-176104). Washington, DC: 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

Senk, J. M. (2015). The life stories of women warriors: An exploratory study of female student-veterans balancing the transition to college (Doctoral dissertation). Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

de la MERCED, M. J. (2017, July 25). Activist Hedge Fund Picks A New Target: ComScore. New York Times, p. B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Webster 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Webster 2013; Wilkinson and Hershko 2015).

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

Two authors: (Wilkinson and Hershko 2015)
Three or more authors: (Fairén et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Human Nature
Abbreviation	Hum. Nat.
ISSN (print)	1045-6767
ISSN (online)	1936-4776
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Social Sciences (miscellaneous) Sociology and Political Science Anthropology