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

S. M. Wilson, Professional development for science teachers. Science. 340, 310–313 (2013).

A journal article with 2 authors

L. Orlando, E. Willerslev, Evolution. An epigenetic window into the past? Science. 345, 511–512 (2014).

A journal article with 3 authors

A. R. Ravishankara, J. S. Daniel, R. W. Portmann, Nitrous oxide (N2O): the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted in the 21st century. Science. 326, 123–125 (2009).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

F. N. Hamada, M. Rosenzweig, K. Kang, S. R. Pulver, A. Ghezzi, T. J. Jegla, P. A. Garrity, An internal thermal sensor controlling temperature preference in Drosophila. Nature. 454, 217–220 (2008).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

H. Schütz, P. M. Wiedemann, W. Hennings, J. Mertens, M. Clauberg, Comparative Risk Assessment (Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG, 2006).

An edited book

E. M. Duarte, Ed., Being and Learning: A Poetic Phenomenology of Education (SensePublishers, Rotterdam, 2012).

A chapter in an edited book

L. Newman, "Questions About Gender: Children with Atypical Gender Development" in Disorders of Sex Development: An Integrated Approach to Management, J. M. Hutson, G. L. Warne, S. R. Grover, Eds. (Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012), pp. 31–39.

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

J. Davis, Portable DNA Sequencer Identifies Species From The Field. IFLScience (2015), (available at https://www.iflscience.com/technology/portable-dna-sequencer-identify-species-field/).

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, “Public Transportation: Preliminary Analysis of Changes to and Trends in FTA’s New Starts and Small Starts Programs” (GAO-07-812T, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2007).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

A. Datta, thesis, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA (2017).

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

R. Lyman, Polish President Offers Plan to End Court Crisis, but the Response Is Tepid. New York Times (2017), p. A8.

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