How to format your references using the Research in Science Education citation style

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

Kawakatsu, H. (2012). Geophysics. At the bottom of the oceanic plate. Science (New York, N.Y.), 335(6075), 1448–1449.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ghosh, A., & Holt, W. E. (2012). Plate motions and stresses from global dynamic models. Science (New York, N.Y.), 335(6070), 838–843.

A journal article with 3 authors

Finlay, J. C., Small, G. E., & Sterner, R. W. (2013). Human influences on nitrogen removal in lakes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 342(6155), 247–250.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Mereghetti, S., Tiengo, A., Esposito, P., La Palombara, N., Israel, G. L., & Stella, L. (2009). An ultramassive, fast-spinning white dwarf in a peculiar binary system. Science (New York, N.Y.), 325(5945), 1222–1223.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sewell, G. (2005). Computational Methods of Linear Algebra. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Leibe, B., Matas, J., Sebe, N., & Welling, M. (Eds.). (2016). Computer Vision – ECCV 2016: 14th European Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 11–14, 2016, Proceedings, Part I (Vol. 9905). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Alferes, J. J., Banti, F., & Brogi, A. (2006). An Event-Condition-Action Logic Programming Language. In M. Fisher, W. van der Hoek, B. Konev, & A. Lisitsa (Eds.), Logics in Artificial Intelligence: 10th European Conference, JELIA 2006 Liverpool, UK, September 13-15, 2006 Proceedings (pp. 29–42). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Research in Science Education.

Blog post

Hale, T. (2016, May 25). Hubble Takes A Celebratory Snap Of Mars As It Nears Its Closest Approach. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/hubble-take-celebratory-snap-mars-it-nears-its-closest-approach/. Accessed 30 October 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. (1995). Highway Safety: Causes of Injury in Automobile Crashes (No. PEMD-95-4). Washington, DC: 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

Salifu, A. (2008). Names that prick: Royal praise names in Dagbon, northern Ghana (Doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Kepner, T. (2017, October 28). A Racist Gesture Results in a Delayed Punishment. New York Times, p. SP3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kawakatsu 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Ghosh and Holt 2012; Kawakatsu 2012).

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

Two authors: (Ghosh and Holt 2012)
Three or more authors: (Mereghetti et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Research in Science Education
Abbreviation	Res. Sci. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0157-244X
ISSN (online)	1573-1898
Scope	Education