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

Rochmyaningsih, D., 2015. Indigenous peoples must benefit from science. Nature 526, 477.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hol, F.J.H., Dekker, C., 2014. Zooming in to see the bigger picture: microfluidic and nanofabrication tools to study bacteria. Science 346, 1251821.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dial, K.P., Jackson, B.E., Segre, P., 2008. A fundamental avian wing-stroke provides a new perspective on the evolution of flight. Nature 451, 985–989.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Taylor, G.J., Luu, T., Ball, D., Srinivasan, M.V., 2013. Vision and air flow combine to streamline flying honeybees. Sci. Rep. 3, 2614.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Fryirs, K.A., Brierley, G.J., 2012. Geomorphic Analysis of River Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Sima, A.A.F. (Ed.), 2012. Diabetes & C-Peptide: Scientific and Clinical Aspects, Contemporary Diabetes. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ.

A chapter in an edited book

Bari, A.T.M.G., Reaz, M.R., Choi, H.-J., Jeong, B.-S., 2013. DNA Encoding for Splice Site Prediction in Large DNA Sequence, in: Hong, B., Meng, X., Chen, L., Winiwarter, W., Song, W. (Eds.), Database Systems for Advanced Applications: 18th International Conference, DASFAA 2013, International Workshops: BDMA, SNSM, SeCoP, Wuhan, China, April 22-25, 2013. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 46–58.

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 Human Brain Has A “Super” Capacity To Recognise Faces — And Neuroscientists, Psychologists, And Police Are Just Starting To Figure Out Why [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/brain/the-human-brain-has-a-super-capacity-to-recognise-faces-and-neuroscientists-psychologists-and-police-are-just-starting-to-figure-out-why/ (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, 1972. Drug Abuse Control Program Activities in the Philippines (No. B-164031(2)). 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

Ghafoori, E., 2014. Wavelet transform and neural network (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, 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

Hodara, S., 2014. Taking in the History of a City Shaped by the Sea. New York Times CT10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rochmyaningsih, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Hol and Dekker, 2014; Rochmyaningsih, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Hol and Dekker, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Taylor et al., 2013)

About the journal

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

Research and Writing Guides