How to format your references using the Nursing Outlook citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nursing Outlook. 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	Download the output style file
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

Bignami, G. F. (2009). Astronomy. Two missions, one microquasar. Science (New York, N.Y.), 326(5959), 1490–1491.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mitchell-Olds, T., & Schmitt, J. (2006). Genetic mechanisms and evolutionary significance of natural variation in Arabidopsis. Nature, 441(7096), 947–952.

A journal article with 3 authors

Fenton, L. K., Geissler, P. E., & Haberle, R. M. (2007). Global warming and climate forcing by recent albedo changes on Mars. Nature, 446(7136), 646–649.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Li, S., Wang, R., Li, D., Ma, J., Li, H., He, X., Chang, Z., & Weng, Y. (2014). Thermal-triggerd proteinquake leads to disassembly of DegP hexamer as an imperative activation step. Scientific Reports, 4, 4834.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Conrick, C., IV, & Hanson, S. (2013). Vertical Option Spreads. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Fourmigué, M., & Ouahab, L. (Eds.). (2009). Conducting and Magnetic Organometallic Molecular Materials (Vol. 27). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Quintero, O. A., Moore, J. E., & Yengo, C. M. (2012). Basics of the Cytoskeleton: Myosins. In M. Kavallaris (Ed.), Cytoskeleton and Human Disease (pp. 73–100). Humana Press.

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 Nursing Outlook.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, September 12). Soft Robot Keeps Moving, Even After Getting Run Over By A Car. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (2014). Cloud Computing: Additional Opportunities and Savings Need to Be Pursued (GAO-14-753). 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

Tabellario, C. M. (2009). A plan to establish a financial counseling center on the campus of California State University, Long Beach [Doctoral dissertation]. 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

Greenhouse, L. (2006, January 1). A New Justice, an Old Plea: More Money for the Bench. New York Times, 113.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bignami, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Bignami, 2009; Mitchell-Olds & Schmitt, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Mitchell-Olds & Schmitt, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Li et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Nursing Outlook
Abbreviation	Nurs. Outlook
ISSN (print)	0029-6554
Scope	General Nursing