How to format your references using the Science citation style

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

D. Rochmyaningsih, Don’t distort policy in the name of national pride. Nature 523, 257 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

Y. Lu, R. Conrad, In situ stable isotope probing of methanogenic archaea in the rice rhizosphere. Science 309, 1088–1090 (2005).

A journal article with 3 authors

M. Pagel, C. Venditti, A. Meade, Large punctuational contribution of speciation to evolutionary divergence at the molecular level. Science 314, 119–121 (2006).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

C. Shen, X. Wang, W. Zhang, F. Kang, Direct prototyping of patterned nanoporous carbon: a route from materials to on-chip devices. Sci. Rep. 3, 2294 (2013).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

J. A. Vilensky, W. M. Robertson, C. A. Suárez-Quian, The Clinical Anatomy of the Cranial Nerves (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2015).

An edited book

P.-C. Chen, US Firms’ Business Competence in the Taiwanese IT Industry (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016)Understanding China.

A chapter in an edited book

A. Deplazes, A. Ganguli-Mitra, N. Biller-Andorno, “The Ethics of Synthetic Biology: Outlining the Agenda” in Synthetic Biology: The Technoscience and Its Societal Consequences, M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra, H. Vriend, Eds. (Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2010), pp. 65–79.

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 Science.

Blog post

S. Luntz, Copper Can Destroy Respiratory Viruses, IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/copper-destroys-respiratory-viruses/.

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, “Health Information Technology: HHS Is Pursuing Efforts to Advance Nationwide Implementation, but Has Not Yet Completed a National Strategy” (GAO-08-499T, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2008).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

R. L. Gordon, “Neural and behavioral correlates of song prosody,” Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL (2010).

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

L. Alvarez, Pandemonium Followed Rumor of Second Airport Attacker, New York Times (2017)p. A9.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text

About the journal

Full journal title	Science
Abbreviation	Science
ISSN (print)	0036-8075
ISSN (online)	1095-9203
Scope	Multidisciplinary