How to format your references using the Royal Society Open Science citation style

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

Struhl K. 2001 Gene regulation. A paradigm for precision. Science 293, 1054–1055.

A journal article with 2 authors

Grewal SIS, Moazed D. 2003 Heterochromatin and epigenetic control of gene expression. Science 301, 798–802.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dickinson DJ, Nelson WJ, Weis WI. 2011 A polarized epithelium organized by beta- and alpha-catenin predates cadherin and metazoan origins. Science 331, 1336–1339.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Mimee M et al. 2018 An ingestible bacterial-electronic system to monitor gastrointestinal health. Science 360, 915–918.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Horstmeyer SL. 2011 The Weather Almanac. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Llorente AM, editor. 2008 Principles of Neuropsychological Assessment with Hispanics: Theoretical Foundations and Clinical Practice. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Rischpater R, Zucker D. 2010 Beginning Qt Development. In Beginning Nokia Apps Development: Qt and HTML5 for Symbian and MeeGo (ed D Zucker), pp. 59–86. Berkeley, CA: Apress.

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 Royal Society Open Science.

Blog post

Luntz S. 2017 Catastrophic Erosion Cut Britain Off From Europe Nearly Half A Million Years Ago. 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. 2009 Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Fiscal Year 2009 Highway Trust Fund Excise Taxes.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Heffner MD. 2017 Informing Decision-Making for Derailments Involving Hazmat: An Analysis of Phmsa Train Accident Data. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Crow K. 2001 Sailors’ Quarters, Once 25 Cents. New York Times, 22 April. , 143.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Royal Society Open Science
Abbreviation	R. Soc. Open Sci.
ISSN (online)	2054-5703
Scope