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

Landweber, L. F. (2007). Genetics. Why genomes in pieces? Science (New York, N.Y.), 318(5849), 405–407.

A journal article with 2 authors

Brewer, P. G., & Peltzer, E. T. (2009). OCEANS. Limits to marine life. Science (New York, N.Y.), 324(5925), 347–348.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen, W., Shimada, S., & Tanaka, M. (2002). Synthesis and structure of formally hexavalent palladium complexes. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5553), 308–310.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Negi, J., Matsuda, O., Nagasawa, T., Oba, Y., Takahashi, H., Kawai-Yamada, M., et al. (2008). CO2 regulator SLAC1 and its homologues are essential for anion homeostasis in plant cells. Nature, 452(7186), 483–486.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Haginomori, E., Koshiduka, T., Arai, J., & Ikeda, H. (2016). Power System Transient Analysis. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Lewis, M. A. (2016). The Mathematics Behind Biological Invasions. (S. V. Petrovskii & J. R. Potts, Eds.) (Vol. 44). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Angelopoulos, S., Lucarelli, G., & Nguyen, K. T. (2015). Primal-Dual and Dual-Fitting Analysis of Online Scheduling Algorithms for Generalized Flow Time Problems. In N. Bansal & I. Finocchi (Eds.), Algorithms - ESA 2015: 23rd Annual European Symposium, Patras, Greece, September 14-16, 2015, Proceedings (pp. 35–46). 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

Carpineti, A. (2016, May 5). Watch SpaceX’s Barge Landing In This Breathtaking 360 Video. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/space-x-barge-landing-breathtaking-360-view/. 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. (1992). Nonfederal Student Loans (No. HRD-93-1R). 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

Gillespie, L. (2014). Trust in Leadership: Investigation of Andragogical Learning and Implications for Student Placement Outcomes (Doctoral dissertation). Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO.

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

Nechepurenko, I. (2017, April 20). Kremlin Group Viewed As a Propaganda Mill. New York Times, p. A11.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Landweber 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Brewer and Peltzer 2009; Landweber 2007).

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

Two authors: (Brewer and Peltzer 2009)
Three or more authors: (Negi et al. 2008)

About the journal

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