How to format your references using the The Science of Nature citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Science of Nature. 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

Kreeger K (2003) Stacking the deck. Nature 422:784–785

A journal article with 2 authors

Carlsson F, Brown EJ (2009) Cell biology. The art of making an exit. Science 323:1678–1679

A journal article with 3 authors

Tewksbury JJ, Huey RB, Deutsch CA (2008) Ecology. Putting the heat on tropical animals. Science 320:1296–1297

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Pors A, Albrektsen O, Radko IP, Bozhevolnyi SI (2013) Gap plasmon-based metasurfaces for total control of reflected light. Sci Rep 3:2155

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Holsclaw G (2016) Transcending Subjects. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Jones S (2016) On Mutant Pedagogies: Seeking Justice and Drawing Change in Teacher Education. SensePublishers, Rotterdam

A chapter in an edited book

Rao C, Darzi A, Athanasiou T (2011) An Introduction to Decision Analysis. In: Darzi A, Athanasiou T (eds) Evidence Synthesis in Healthcare: A Practical Handbook for Clinicians. Springer, London, pp 127–140

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 The Science of Nature.

Blog post

Carpineti C (2017) New Dead Sea Scrolls Cave Discovered In Israel. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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

Government Accountability Office (2016) Commercial Space Launch Insurance: Views Differ on Need for Change to Insurance Approach but Clarification Is Needed. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Duan C (2004) Dynamic Analysis of Dry Friction Path in a Torsional System. 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

Vecsey G (2011) Great Pitching, Greater Expectations. New York Times B17

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kreeger 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Kreeger 2003; Carlsson and Brown 2009).

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

Two authors: (Carlsson and Brown 2009)
Three or more authors: (Pors et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Science of Nature
Abbreviation	Sci. Nat.
ISSN (print)	0028-1042
ISSN (online)	1432-1904
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics General Medicine