How to format your references using the National Academy Science Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for National Academy Science Letters. 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

Friedman WE (2009) Evolution. Auxin at the evo-devo intersection. Science 324:1652–1653

A journal article with 2 authors

Holme P, Liljeros F (2014) Birth and death of links control disease spreading in empirical contact networks. Sci Rep 4:4999

A journal article with 3 authors

Yang RT, Hernández-Maldonado AJ, Yang FH (2003) Desulfurization of transportation fuels with zeolites under ambient conditions. Science 301:79–81

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhao Q, Zhou H, Chi S, et al (2018) Structure and mechanogating mechanism of the Piezo1 channel. Nature 554:487–492

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wei J (2012) Great Inventions that Changed the World. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Shirahata S, Ikura K, Nagao M, et al (2009) Animal Cell Technology: Basic & Applied Aspects: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Association for Animal Cell Technology (JAACT), Kyoto, Japan, September 25-28, 2006. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Butler JL, Sherman CH (2016) Transducer Characteristics. In: Sherman CH (ed) Transducers and Arrays for Underwater Sound. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 153–184

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 National Academy Science Letters.

Blog post

Andrew D (2015) Man Straps Drones Together To Create A DIY Hovercraft. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/man-straps-drones-together-and-creates-working-hovercraft/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (2016) Information Technology: Better Management of Interdependencies between Programs Supporting 2020 Census Is Needed. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ramakrishnan L (2009) Multi-level adaptation for performability in dynamic web service workflows. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana 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

Crow K (2002) Looking for Wiseguys In the Land of Checked Tablecloths. New York Times 146

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1, 2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	National Academy Science Letters
Abbreviation	Natl. Acad. Sci. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0250-541X
ISSN (online)	2250-1754
Scope	Engineering (miscellaneous)