How to format your references using the Social and Natural Sciences Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Social and Natural Sciences Journal. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science (New York, N.Y.), 316(5827), 998–1002.
A journal article with 2 authors
Bever, T., & Montalbetti, M. (2002). Linguistics. Noam’s Ark. Science (New York, N.Y.), 298(5598), 1565–1566.
A journal article with 3 authors
Arnqvist, G., Jones, T. M., & Elgar, M. A. (2003). Insect behaviour: reversal of sex roles in nuptial feeding. Nature, 424(6947), 387.
A journal article with 8 or more authors
Karpova, N. N., Pickenhagen, A., Lindholm, J., Tiraboschi, E., Kulesskaya, N., Agústsdóttir, A., Antila, H., Popova, D., Akamine, Y., Bahi, A., Sullivan, R., Hen, R., Drew, L. J., & Castrén, E. (2011). Fear erasure in mice requires synergy between antidepressant drugs and extinction training. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6063), 1731–1734.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Rossi, R. J. (2006). Theorems, Corollaries, Lemmas, and Methods of Proof. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Altvater, E., & Brunnengräber, A. (Eds.). (2011). After Cancún: Climate Governance or Climate Conflicts. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
A chapter in an edited book
Panin, I. (2005). Purity for multipliers. In R. Tandon (Ed.), Algebra and Number Theory: Proceedings of the Silver Jubilee Conference University of Hyderabad (pp. 66–89). Hindustan Book Agency.

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 Social and Natural Sciences Journal.

Blog post
Andrew, E. (2014, October 29). Inside A Body Farm. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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. (2007). Drug Testing: Undercover Tests Reveal Significant Vulnerabilities in DOT’s Drug Testing Program (GAO-08-225T). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
Starr, M. J. (2015). Tests for Positive Selection on Genes Encoding Heat Shock Proteins in the Marine Slipper Snail, Crepidula fornicata [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Louisiana.

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
Kanter, J. (2017, February 16). Celebrating Trade Deal, Trudeau Praises E.U. New York Times, A8.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Haidt, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Bever & Montalbetti, 2002; Haidt, 2007).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

  • Two authors: (Bever & Montalbetti, 2002)
  • Three authors: (Arnqvist et al., 2003)
  • 6 or more authors: (Karpova et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal titleSocial and Natural Sciences Journal
ISSN (print)1804-4158
ISSN (online)1804-9710
Scope

Other styles