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

Gomory R. Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010). Nature. 2010 Nov 18;468(7322):378.

A journal article with 2 authors

Loehlin DW, Carroll SB. Evolutionary biology: Sex, lies and butterflies. Nature. 2014 Mar 13;507(7491):172–3.

A journal article with 3 authors

Agrawal AF, Brodie ED 3rd, Brown J. Parent-offspring coadaptation and the dual genetic control of maternal care. Science. 2001 Jun 1;292(5522):1710–2.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Lin J, Heo Y-U, Nattestad A, Sun Z, Wang L, Kim JH, et al. 3D hierarchical rutile TiO2 and metal-free organic sensitizer producing dye-sensitized solar cells 8.6% conversion efficiency. Sci. Rep. 2014 Aug 29;4:5769.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Liu S, Liu Y. Modeling and Simulation for Microelectronic Packaging Assembly. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd; 2011.

An edited book

Beets G, Schippers J, te Velde ER, editors. The Future of Motherhood in Western Societies: Late Fertility and its Consequences. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

Dimirovski GM. Learning Intelligent Controls in High Speed Networks: Synergies of Computational Intelligence with Control and Q-Learning Theories. In: Sgurev V, Yager RR, Kacprzyk J, Jotsov V, editors. Innovative Issues in Intelligent Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2016. p. 111–39.

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. Astronomers Find Smallest Galaxy With Supermassive Black Hole [Internet]. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2014 [cited 2018 Oct 30]. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-find-smallest-galaxy-supermassive-black-hole/

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. Airline Competition: Issues Raised by Consolidation Proposals. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2001 Feb. Report No.: GAO-01-402T.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Peterson NR. Subspecies composition, genetic variation and structure of Largemouth Bass in Puerto Rico reservoirs [Doctoral dissertation]. [Mississippi State, MS]: Mississippi State University; 2015.

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

Gustines GG. Captain America’s Mom: Some Shocking News. New York Times. 2016 May 26;C3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gomory 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Gomory 2010; Loehlin and Carroll 2014).

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

Two authors: (Loehlin and Carroll 2014)
Three or more authors: (Lin et al. 2014)

About the journal

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