How to format your references using the NursingPlus Open citation style

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

Standfuss, J. (2015). Structural biology. Viral chemokine mimicry. Science (New York, N.Y.), 347(6226), 1071–1072.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kramer, T., & Wilson, A. (2003). Making the move from physics to finance. Nature, 425(6954), 220–221.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kent, A., Massar, S., & Silman, J. (2014). Secure and robust transmission and verification of unknown quantum states in Minkowski space. Scientific Reports, 4, 3901.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Rowe, M. A., Kielpinski, D., Meyer, V., Sackett, C. A., Itano, W. M., Monroe, C., & Wineland, D. J. (2001). Experimental violation of a Bell’s inequality with efficient detection. Nature, 409(6822), 791–794.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kyan, M., Muneesawang, P., Jarrah, K., & Guan, L. (2014). Unsupervised Learning. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Erdmann, V. A., & Barciszewski, J. (Eds.). (2010). RNA Technologies and Their Applications. Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Heck, R. G. (2007). Finitude and Hume’s Principle. In R. T. Cook (Ed.), The Arché Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction (pp. 61–84). Springer Netherlands.

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 NursingPlus Open.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, May 3). Meet The Woman With Two Vaginas. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/meet-woman-two-vginas/

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. (1994). Air Force F-22 Embedded Computers (AIMD-94-177R). 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

Rajendran, N. (2010). Assessment of upper extremity strength, power, and flexibility characteristics of college-aged male and female students [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

Koblin, J., & Barnes, B. (2017, October 24). Hulu’s Chief Since 2013 Quits to Lead Sony TV Unit. New York Times, B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Standfuss, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Kramer & Wilson, 2003; Standfuss, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Kramer & Wilson, 2003)
Three authors: (Kent et al., 2014)
6 or more authors: (Rowe et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	NursingPlus Open
Abbreviation	NursingPlus Open
ISSN (print)	2352-9008
Scope