How to format your references using the Naturwissenschaften citation style

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

Gilbert N (2011) Regulations: Herbal medicine rule book. Nature 480:S98-9

A journal article with 2 authors

Faden RR, Karron RA (2012) Public health and biosecurity. The obligation to prevent the next dual-use controversy. Science 335:802–804

A journal article with 3 authors

Sansom RS, Gabbott SE, Purnell MA (2010) Non-random decay of chordate characters causes bias in fossil interpretation. Nature 463:797–800

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Fairclough DV, Brown JI, Carlish BJ, et al (2014) Breathing life into fisheries stock assessments with citizen science. Sci Rep 4:7249

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Subramanian MN (2013) Plastics Additives and Testing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Parks WC, Mecham RP (eds) (2011) Extracellular Matrix Degradation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Morales Chacón LM, Báez Martin MM (2015) Autism Spectrum Disorder. A Clinical Neurophysiology Approach I. In: Robinson-Agramonte M de LA (ed) Translational Approaches to Autism Spectrum Disorder. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 65–83

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 Naturwissenschaften.

Blog post

O`Callaghan J (2016) Mystery Of Missing Big Craters On Dwarf Planet Ceres May Have Been Solved. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/mystery-of-missing-big-craters-on-dwarf-planet-ceres-may-have-been-solved/. 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 (2007) Health Information Technology: Efforts Continue but Comprehensive Privacy Approach Needed for National Strategy. 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

Joppy DA (2013) Principal Socialization in One Virginia School District: A Phenomenological Investigation. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington 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

Hollander S (1999) Inspiring Without Saying a Word. New York Times F3

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gilbert 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Gilbert 2011; Faden and Karron 2012).

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

Two authors: (Faden and Karron 2012)
Three or more authors: (Fairclough et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Naturwissenschaften
Abbreviation	Sci. Nat.
ISSN (print)	0028-1042
ISSN (online)	1432-1904
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics General Medicine