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

Mervis J (2000) RESEARCH POLICY: Report Tracks Federal Funding in Each State. Science 288:2115b

A journal article with 2 authors

Golde TE, Kukar TL (2009) Medicine. Avoiding unintended toxicity. Science 324:603–604

A journal article with 3 authors

Tuthill PG, Monnier JD, Danchi WC (2001) A dusty torus around the luminous young star LkH alpha101. Nature 409:1012–1014

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Chandrashekar J, Yarmolinsky D, von Buchholtz L, et al (2009) The taste of carbonation. Science 326:443–445

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tebbani S, Lopes F, Filali R, et al (2014) CO 2 Biofixation by Microalgae. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Goble L, Meyer J-JC (2006) Deontic Logic and Artificial Normative Systems: 8th International Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, DEON 2006, Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 12-14, 2006. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Sergeyev YD, Strongin RG, Lera D (2013) A Brief Conclusion. In: Strongin RG, Lera D (eds) Introduction to Global Optimization Exploiting Space-Filling Curves. Springer, New York, NY, pp 117–118

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

Davis J (2016) World’s Largest Primate Now Considered “Critically Endangered.” In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/worlds-largest-primate-now-considered-critically-endangered/. 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 (1990) FAA Encountering Problems in Acquiring Major Automated Systems. 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

Boyer GC (2012) Best Practices for Student Success on the ACT. Doctoral dissertation, Lindenwood 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

Brantley B (2017) The Irresistible Attraction of an Assault Rifle. New York Times C5

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)