How to format your references using the Scientific African citation style

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

[1]

H. Harris, Tumour suppression: putting on the brakes, Nature 427 (2004) 201.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S.G. Yelenik, C.M. D’Antonio, Self-reinforcing impacts of plant invasions change over time, Nature 503 (2013) 517–520.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

L.-Y. Chen, S. Redon, J. Lingner, The human CST complex is a terminator of telomerase activity, Nature 488 (2012) 540–544.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

C. Bahr, L. von Paleske, V.V. Uslu, S. Remeseiro, N. Takayama, S.W. Ng, A. Murison, K. Langenfeld, M. Petretich, R. Scognamiglio, P. Zeisberger, A.S. Benk, I. Amit, P.W. Zandstra, M. Lupien, J.E. Dick, A. Trumpp, F. Spitz, Author Correction: A Myc enhancer cluster regulates normal and leukaemic haematopoietic stem cell hierarchies, Nature 558 (2018) E4.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. Aichinger, A. Binder, A Workout in Computational Finance, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

B. Jähne, R. Mester, E. Barth, H. Scharr, eds., Complex Motion: First International Workshop, IWCM 2004, Günzburg, Germany, October 12-14, 2004. Revised Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

H.-J. Choi, A.S. Cohen, B.A. Bottge, An Application of a Random Mixture Nominal Item Response Model for Investigating Instruction Effects, in: L.A. van der Ark, D.M. Bolt, W.-C. Wang, J.A. Douglas, M. Wiberg (Eds.), Quantitative Psychology Research: The 80th Annual Meeting of the Psychometric Society, Beijing, 2015, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 39–48.

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 Scientific African.

Blog post

[1]

A. Carpineti, Watch These Droplets Of Water Get Blown Up By A Laser, IFLScience (2016).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, National Airspace System: Observations on the Wide Area Augmentation System, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

G. Chen, Essays On Using Weather Derivatives In Dairy Production, Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005.

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

[1]

S. Kishkovsky, Russian Novelist Scoffs at Post-Soviet Leaders, New York Times (2002) 114.

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	Scientific African
ISSN (print)	2468-2276
Scope