How to format your references using the Life Sciences, Society and Policy citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Life Sciences, Society and Policy. 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

Simon SH. Physics. A sound (and light) way to measure confined electrons. Science. 2009 May 22;324(5930):1022–3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gebbers R, Adamchuk VI. Precision agriculture and food security. Science. 2010 Feb 12;327(5967):828–31.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hatano T, Stopa M, Tarucha S. Single-electron delocalization in hybrid vertical-lateral double quantum dots. Science. 2005 Jul 8;309(5732):268–71.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Yoo AS, Staahl BT, Chen L, Crabtree GR. MicroRNA-mediated switching of chromatin-remodelling complexes in neural development. Nature. 2009 Jul 30;460(7255):642–6.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lundberg U, Cooper CL. The Science of Occupational Health. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010.

An edited book

Kundu D. Statistical Signal Processing: Frequency Estimation. Nandi S, editor. New Delhi: Springer India; 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

Mitchell GR, Wangsoub S, Nogales A, Davis FJ, Olley RH. Controlling Morphology Using Low Molar Mass Nucleators. In: Mitchell GR, Tojeira A, editors. Controlling the Morphology of Polymers: Multiple Scales of Structure and Processing. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. p. 145–61.

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 Life Sciences, Society and Policy.

Blog post

Andrew E. Rising Carbon Dioxide Is Greening The Earth - But It’s Not All Good News [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2016 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/environment/rising-carbon-dioxide-greening-earth-it-s-not-all-good-news/

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. Higher Education: A Small Percentage of Families Save in 529 Plans. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2012 Dec. Report No.: GAO-13-64.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Hume DM. The reader as collaborator in Coleridge’s fragments “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”: Kindling “Native flames” rather than reflecting “Alien fires” [Doctoral dissertation]. [Long Beach, CA]: California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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

Billard M. Solving a Dress-Design Sudoku. New York Times. 2010 May 20;E5.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Simon 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Gebbers and Adamchuk 2010; Simon 2009).

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

Two authors: (Gebbers and Adamchuk 2010)
Three or more authors: (Yoo et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Life Sciences, Society and Policy
Abbreviation	Life Sci. Soc. Policy
ISSN (online)	2195-7819
Scope