How to format your references using the International Journal of Science Education, Part B citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for International Journal of Science Education, Part B. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Ball, P. (2000). Meet the spin doctors. Nature, 404(6781), 918–920.
A journal article with 2 authors
Papavasiliou, F. N., & Schatz, D. G. (2000). Cell-cycle-regulated DNA double-stranded breaks in somatic hypermutation of immunoglobulin genes. Nature, 408(6809), 216–221.
A journal article with 3 authors
Gao, G., Guo, X., & Goff, S. P. (2002). Inhibition of retroviral RNA production by ZAP, a CCCH-type zinc finger protein. Science (New York, N.Y.), 297(5587), 1703–1706.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Munteanu, A., Cotterell, J., Solé, R. V., & Sharpe, J. (2014). Design principles of stripe-forming motifs: the role of positive feedback. Scientific Reports, 4, 5003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Cremona, C. (2013). Structural Performance. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Rowiński, P. (Ed.). (2013). Experimental and Computational Solutions of Hydraulic Problems: 32nd International School of Hydraulics. Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Trotter, G. (2012). Why the West Spurns Medical Rituals. In D. Solomon, R. Fan, & P.-C. Lo (Eds.), Ritual and the Moral Life: Reclaiming the Tradition (pp. 75–86). Springer Netherlands.

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 International Journal of Science Education, Part B.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2015, June 18). FDA Wants to Ban Trans Fat. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (2013). Education Needs to Further Examine Data Collection on English Language Learners in Charter Schools (GAO-13-655R). 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
Zhou, Y. (2010). Resource Management in Wireless Networks: Queue Management and Scheduling in Mesh Networks and Multi-Access Control in Internetworking Systems [Doctoral dissertation]. George Washington University.

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
Palmer, E., & Otis, J. (2017, April 8). Lifting Hope, With Global Reach. New York Times, A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ball, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Ball, 2000; Papavasiliou & Schatz, 2000).

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

  • Two authors: (Papavasiliou & Schatz, 2000)
  • Three authors: (Gao et al., 2002)
  • 6 or more authors: (Munteanu et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleInternational Journal of Science Education, Part B
ISSN (print)2154-8455
ISSN (online)2154-8463
Scope

Other styles