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:

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

Marder, E. (2001). Moving rhythms. Nature, 410(6830), 755.

A journal article with 2 authors

Imura, T., & Tomonaga, M. (2013). A ground-like surface facilitates visual search in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Scientific Reports, 3, 2343.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wade, J. T., Hall, D. B., & Struhl, K. (2004). The transcription factor Ifh1 is a key regulator of yeast ribosomal protein genes. Nature, 432(7020), 1054–1058.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Lee, S., Hwang, I., Oh, S., Hong, S., Kim, Y., Nam, Y., Lee, K., Yoon, C., Kim, W., & Park, B. H. (2014). Ultra-thin resistive switching oxide layers self-assembled by field-induced oxygen migration (FIOM) technique. Scientific Reports, 4, 6871.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chan, N. H., & Wong, H. Y. (2013). Handbook of Financial Risk Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Grady, L. J. (2010). Discrete Calculus: Applied Analysis on Graphs for Computational Science (J. R. Polimeni, Ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Blasco, O. (2010). The Bohr Radius of a Banach Space. In G. P. Curbera, G. Mockenhaupt, & W. J. Ricker (Eds.), Vector Measures, Integration and Related Topics (pp. 59–64). Birkhäuser.

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, December 9). Scientists Recreate First Spark Of Life. 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. (1994). NASA Contract Management: Improving the Use of DCAA’s Auditing Services (NSIAD-94-229). 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

Adler, A. D. (2012). Change in Automatic and Strategic Cognition: An Examination of Cognitive Therapy for Depression [Doctoral dissertation]. Ohio State University.

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

Baker, P., & Fisher, I. (2017, May 22). Trump Stresses Palestinian Deal. New York Times, A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Marder, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Imura & Tomonaga, 2013; Marder, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Imura & Tomonaga, 2013)
Three authors: (Wade et al., 2004)
6 or more authors: (Lee et al., 2014)

About the journal

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