How to format your references using the Studies in Science Education citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Studies in Science Education. 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

Pain, S. (2015). A potted history. Nature, 525(7570), S10-1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Campbell, I. H., & O’Neill, H. S. C. (2012). Evidence against a chondritic Earth. Nature, 483(7391), 553–558.

A journal article with 3 authors

Blumenstock, J., Cadamuro, G., & On, R. (2015). Predicting poverty and wealth from mobile phone metadata. Science (New York, N.Y.), 350(6264), 1073–1076.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Nallagatla, S. R., Hwang, J., Toroney, R., Zheng, X., Cameron, C. E., & Bevilacqua, P. C. (2007). 5’-triphosphate-dependent activation of PKR by RNAs with short stem-loops. Science (New York, N.Y.), 318(5855), 1455–1458.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Nomura, S. (2016). Micromechanics with Mathematica. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Gil, Z., & Fliss, D. M. (Eds.). (2012). Tumours of the Skull Base and Paranasal Sinuses (1st ed. 2012). Springer India.

A chapter in an edited book

Granov, A., Tiutin, L., & Schwarz, T. (2013). Lung Cancer. In A. Granov, L. Tiutin, & T. Schwarz (Eds.), Positron Emission Tomography (pp. 77–88). Springer.

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 Studies in Science Education.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, May 29). You’ve Been Drinking Coffee Wrong This Whole Time. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/you-ve-been-drinking-coffee-wrong-whole-time/

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. (1986). Defaulted Student Loans: Guaranty Agencies’ Collection Practices and Procedures (HRD-86-114BR). 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

Zhao, J. (2012). Contextual Differential Item Functioning: Examining the Validity of Teaching Self-Efficacy Instruments Using Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling [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

Liptak, A., & Walsh, M. W. (2016, June 14). Justices Reject Puerto Rico Law in Case on Restructuring Debt. New York Times, B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pain, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Campbell & O’Neill, 2012; Pain, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Campbell & O’Neill, 2012)
Three authors: (Blumenstock et al., 2015)
6 or more authors: (Nallagatla et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Studies in Science Education
Abbreviation	Stud. Sci. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0305-7267
ISSN (online)	1940-8412
Scope	Education