How to format your references using the iScience citation style

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

Loder, N., 2000. UK labs impeded by old equipment. Nature 405, 496.

A journal article with 2 authors

Nuth, J.A., 3rd, Johnson, N.M., 2012. Astronomy. Complex protostellar chemistry. Science 336, 424–425.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ye, Y., Meyer, H.H., Rapoport, T.A., 2001. The AAA ATPase Cdc48/p97 and its partners transport proteins from the ER into the cytosol. Nature 414, 652–656.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Mann, N.H., Cook, A., Millard, A., Bailey, S., Clokie, M., 2003. Marine ecosystems: bacterial photosynthesis genes in a virus. Nature 424, 741.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lindahl, D., 2008. Multi-Family Millions. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Xu, Y., Xu, D., Liang, J. (Eds.), 2007. Computational Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Modeling: Volume 2: Structure Prediction, Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Malo, M.Á., Pagán, R., 2014. Hiring Workers with Disabilities When a Quota Requirement Exists: The Relevance of Firm’s Size, in: Malo, M.Á., Sciulli, D. (Eds.), Disadvantaged Workers: Empirical Evidence and Labour Policies, AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 49–63.

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 iScience.

Blog post

Fang, J., 2015. 2,000-Year-Old Burial Site Contained Bobcat Kitten Wearing a Necklace [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/2000-year-old-burial-site-contained-bobcat-kitten-wearing-necklace/ (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, 1999. Telecommunications: Impact of Sports Programming Costs on Cable Television Rates (No. RCED-99-136). 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

Thomas Hurford, C.E., 2010. “In his arm the scar”: Medicine, race, and the social implications of the 1721 inoculation controversy on Boston (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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

Ratliff, B., 2016. Imagine Beckett as a Cranky Songwriter. New York Times AR12.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Loder, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Loder, 2000; Nuth and Johnson, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Nuth and Johnson, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Mann et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	iScience
ISSN (print)	2589-0042
Scope