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

Young LJ (2009) Being human: love: neuroscience reveals all. Nature 457:148

A journal article with 2 authors

Baughn AD, Malamy MH (2004) The strict anaerobe Bacteroides fragilis grows in and benefits from nanomolar concentrations of oxygen. Nature 427:441–444

A journal article with 3 authors

Cwiok S, Heenen P-H, Nazarewicz W (2005) Shape coexistence and triaxiality in the superheavy nuclei. Nature 433:705–709

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Miura A, Yonebayashi S, Watanabe K, et al (2001) Mobilization of transposons by a mutation abolishing full DNA methylation in Arabidopsis. Nature 411:212–214

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Péra M-C, Hissel D, Gualous H, Turpin C (2013) Electrochemical Components. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ USA

An edited book

Mittelstadt BD, Floridi L (eds) (2016) The Ethics of Biomedical Big Data. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Pettinari M, Sangiorgi C, Petretto F, Picariello F (2012) Comparison between 2PB and 4PB Methodologies Based on the Dissipated Energy Approach. In: Scarpas A, Kringos N, Al-Qadi I, A. L (eds) 7th RILEM International Conference on Cracking in Pavements: Mechanisms, Modeling, Testing, Detection and Prevention Case Histories. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 31–39

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

Andrew E (2016) El Niño Is Over, But Has Left Its Mark Across The World. In: IFLScience. 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 (1979) Grumman Corporation Computer Software Development Costs and Licensing Fees Paid by the Government. 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

Mathus MA (2017) The Relationship between Teacher Evaluation Ratings and Student Achievement in a Rural, Midwest School District. 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

Baker L (2011) In Vancouver, a New Effort to Sell Olympic Condos. New York Times B6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Young 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Baughn and Malamy 2004; Young 2009).

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

Two authors: (Baughn and Malamy 2004)
Three or more authors: (Miura et al. 2001)

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