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

Ron, David. 2006. Cell biology. Stressed cells cope with protein overload. Science (New York, N.Y.) 313: 52–53.

A journal article with 2 authors

Synolakis, Costas, and Spyros Foteinis. 2009. Choking on carbon emissions from Greek academic paperwork. Nature 461: 167.

A journal article with 3 authors

Long, John A., Kate Trinajstic, and Zerina Johanson. 2009. Devonian arthrodire embryos and the origin of internal fertilization in vertebrates. Nature 457: 1124–1127.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Wu, Jingxia, Jingye Li, Bo Deng, Haiqing Jiang, Ziqiang Wang, Ming Yu, Linfan Li, Chenyang Xing, and Yongjin Li. 2013. Self-healing of the superhydrophobicity by ironing for the abrasion durable superhydrophobic cotton fabrics. Scientific reports 3: 2951.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ahamed, Syed V. 2006. Intelligent Internet Knowledge Networks. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Liu, Zhanwen, ed. 2009. Essentials of Chinese Medicine. London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Kamran, Saman, and Mehdi Jazayeri. 2015. Dynamic Content and User Identification in Social Semantic Tagging Systems. In Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering: 12th International Conference, CDVE 2015, Mallorca, Spain, September 20-23, 2015. Proceedings, ed. Yuhua Luo, 36–47. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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

Andrew, Elise. 2014. Newly-Discovered Deep Sea ‘Mushroom’ Could Re-Write Tree of Life. IFLScience. IFLScience. September 3.

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. 2011. Surface Transportation: Competitive Grant Programs Could Benefit from Increased Performance Focus and Better Documentation of Key Decisions. GAO-11-234. 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

Cope, Jeff A. 2015. Coastal squeeze of vegetation zones in the Los Cerritos Wetlands: The effect of sea level rise. Doctoral dissertation, Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach.

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

Hubbard, Ben, and Thomas Erdbrink. 2017. Siding With the Saudis. New York Times, May 22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ron 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Ron 2006; Synolakis and Foteinis 2009).

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

Two authors: (Synolakis and Foteinis 2009)
Three or more authors: (Wu et al. 2013)

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