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]

S. Atran, Genesis of suicide terrorism, Science. 299 (2003) 1534–1539.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Maheswaran, D.A. Haber, Cell fate: Transition loses its invasive edge, Nature. 527 (2015) 452–453.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

C.G. Kurland, L.J. Collins, D. Penny, Genomics and the irreducible nature of eukaryote cells, Science. 312 (2006) 1011–1014.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

E.A. Clark, T.R. Golub, E.S. Lander, R.O. Hynes, Genomic analysis of metastasis reveals an essential role for RhoC, Nature. 406 (2000) 532–535.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

F. Gustafsson, Adaptive Filtering and Change Detection, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2001.

An edited book

[1]

M.M. Kowalewski, P.A. Garber, L. Cortés-Ortiz, B. Urbani, D. Youlatos, eds., Howler Monkeys: Adaptive Radiation, Systematics, and Morphology, Springer, New York, NY, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Gkoulalas-Divanis, V.S. Verykios, Other Knowledge Hiding Methodologies, in: V.S. Verykios (Ed.), Association Rule Hiding for Data Mining, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2010: pp. 21–24.

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]

T. Hale, You Can Now Listen To A Song That Hasn’t Been Played For 1,000 Years, IFLScience. (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/listen-song-which-hadnt-been-played-1000-years/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Federal Research: Preliminary Information on the Small Business Technology Transfer Program, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A. Cross, Tinkering in k-12: an exploratory mixed methods study of makerspaces in schools as an application of constructivist learning, Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, 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

[1]

J. Poniewozik, Rich, and a Jerk, but Then, Wait for It . . , New York Times. (2017) C7.

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