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]

J.H. Fowler, Human cooperation: second-order free-riding problem solved?, Nature 437 (2005) E8; discussion E8-9.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A.R. Buskirk, R. Green, Biochemistry. Getting past polyproline pauses, Science 339 (2013) 38–39.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

P.C. Zhang, A.M. Keleshian, F. Sachs, Voltage-induced membrane movement, Nature 413 (2001) 428–432.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

D. Petiteau, S. Guenneau, M. Bellieud, M. Zerrad, C. Amra, Spectral effectiveness of engineered thermal cloaks in the frequency regime, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 7386.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

E. Simiu, Design of Buildings for Wind, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

J. Seckbach, ed., Life as We Know It, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

N. Reddy, Y. Yang, Fibers from Sorghum Stems and Leaves, in: Y. Yang (Ed.), Innovative Biofibers from Renewable Resources, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015: pp. 11–12.

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]

B. Taub, France To End Lifetime Ban On Gay Men Donating Blood, IFLScience (2015).

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, Adult Education: Measuring Program Results Has Been Challenging, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1995.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

I. Breckheimer, Mapping habitat quality in conservation’s neglected geography, Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2012.

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]

B. Brantley, Curtain’s Up. Adulthood Can Wait, New York Times (2017) C6.

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