How to format your references using the Metascience citation style

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

Chyba, C. F. 2000. Energy for microbial life on Europa. Nature 403: 381–382.

A journal article with 2 authors

Palmer, Paul I., and Matthew J. Smith. 2014. Earth systems: Model human adaptation to climate change. Nature 512: 365–366.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cossairt, Brandi M., Mariam-Céline Diawara, and Christopher C. Cummins. 2009. Facile synthesis of AsP3. Science (New York, N.Y.) 323: 602.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Kuo, R. C., G. T. Baxter, S. H. Thompson, S. A. Stricker, C. Patton, J. Bonaventura, and D. Epel. 2000. NO is necessary and sufficient for egg activation at fertilization. Nature 406: 633–636.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chitrapu, Prabhakar. 2005. Wideband TDD. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Kaye, Alan David, Nalini Vadivelu, and Richard D. Urman, ed. 2015. Substance Abuse: Inpatient and Outpatient Management for Every Clinician. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Chen, G. L., C. C. Chang, S. C. Chien, T. S. Tung, H. H. Lee, W. C. Ling, and H. L. Lee. 2007. Plasma-Ion Enhanced Optical Multilayer Thin-Film Coating for Consumer Electronics Products. In Proceedings of the 35th International MATADOR Conference: Formerly The International Machine Tool Design and Research Conference, ed. Srichand Hinduja and Kuang-Chao Fan, 17–20. London: Springer.

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 Metascience.

Blog post

Fang, Janet. 2014. Simple Blood Test Could Tell You When You’re Going To Die. IFLScience. IFLScience. March 5.

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. 1998. Federal Communications Commission: Competitive Bidding Procedures. OGC-98-26. Washington, DC: 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

Gilbert, Stephen Anthony. 2017. Succession Planning Relating to the Millennial Generation in Private Four-Year Universities. Doctoral dissertation, Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University.

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

Kishkovsky, Sophia. 2002. Judges Catch Up, With Some Cramming. New York Times, July 1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Chyba 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Chyba 2000; Palmer and Smith 2014).

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

Two authors: (Palmer and Smith 2014)
Three or more authors: (Kuo et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Metascience
Abbreviation	Metascience
ISSN (print)	0815-0796
ISSN (online)	1467-9981
Scope	History History and Philosophy of Science General Social Sciences