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

Fortey, R. 2001. Evolution. The Cambrian explosion exploded? Science (New York, N.Y.) 293: 438–439.

A journal article with 2 authors

Simpson, Gordon G., and Caroline Dean. 2002. Arabidopsis, the Rosetta stone of flowering time? Science (New York, N.Y.) 296: 285–289.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dethlefsen, Les, Margaret McFall-Ngai, and David A. Relman. 2007. An ecological and evolutionary perspective on human-microbe mutualism and disease. Nature 449: 811–818.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Lin, Y-J, R. L. Compton, K. Jiménez-García, J. V. Porto, and I. B. Spielman. 2009. Synthetic magnetic fields for ultracold neutral atoms. Nature 462: 628–632.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ghiani, Gianpaolo, Gilbert Laporte, and Roberto Musmanno. 2005. Introduction to Logistics Systems Planning and Control. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Cossentino, Massimo, Michael Kaisers, Karl Tuyls, and Gerhard Weiss, ed. 2012. Multi-Agent Systems: 9th European Workshop, EUMAS 2011, Maastricht, The Netherlands, November 14-15, 2011. Revised Selected Papers. Vol. 7541. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

McTear, Michael, Zoraida Callejas, and David Griol. 2016. Conversational Interfaces: Past and Present. In The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices, ed. Zoraida Callejas and David Griol, 51–72. 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

O`Callaghan, Jonathan. 2017. Feral Girl Found With Monkeys In A Forest In India. IFLScience. IFLScience. April 6.

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. 1999. Indoor Pollution: Status of Federal Research Activities. RCED-99-254. 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

Chaves, Juan Scott. 2009. Novel approach for the creation of thin films and interconnects using single walled carbon nanotubes inkjet technology and bacteria. 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

Kelly, Michael. 1992. THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Third-Party Candidate; Perot’s Vision: Consensus by Computer. New York Times, June 6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fortey 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Fortey 2001; Simpson and Dean 2002).

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

Two authors: (Simpson and Dean 2002)
Three or more authors: (Lin et al. 2009)

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