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

Motavalli, J. (2015). Technology: A solid future. Nature 526, S96-7.

A journal article with 2 authors

Cheung, G.Y.C., and Otto, M. (2015). Microbiology: Diverted on the way to memory. Nature 517, 28–29.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yan, W., Smith, C., and Cheng, L. (2013). Expanded activity of dimer nucleases by combining ZFN and TALEN for genome editing. Sci. Rep. 3, 2376.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Balagaddé, F.K., You, L., Hansen, C.L., Arnold, F.H., and Quake, S.R. (2005). Long-term monitoring of bacteria undergoing programmed population control in a microchemostat. Science 309, 137–140.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tissue, B.M. (2013). Basics of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Equilibria (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Dong, Y. (2016). Consensus Building in Group Decision Making: Searching the Consensus Path with Minimum Adjustments J. Xu, ed. (Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Verheul, H.M.W., and Pinedo, H.M. (2005). Angiogenesis inhibitors: What is the clinical future? In Advances in Targeted Cancer Therapy Progress in Drug Research., P. L. Herrling, A. Matter, and R. M. Schultz, eds. (Birkhäuser), pp. 67–91.

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

Andrew, D. (2016). The Average Person Is Supposed to Eat 2,000 Calories per Day — What That Looks like Is Startling. 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 (1986). Computer Capacity: IRS Must Better Estimate Its Computer Resource Needs (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

Eutz, R.J. (2014). The experiences of Recovery High School students: Using empirical phenomenology to garner knowledge.

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

Pilon, M. (2012). Running the World With Eyes Wide Open. New York Times, B10.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ².
This sentence cites two references ^2,4.
This sentence cites four references ^2,4,6,8.

About the journal

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