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

Martin TE (2011) Ecology. The cost of fear. Science 334:1353–1354

A journal article with 2 authors

Hochedlinger K, Jaenisch R (2002) Monoclonal mice generated by nuclear transfer from mature B and T donor cells. Nature 415:1035–1038

A journal article with 3 authors

Smith CE, Llorente B, Symington LS (2007) Template switching during break-induced replication. Nature 447:102–105

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Barnea G, O’Donnell S, Mancia F, et al (2004) Odorant receptors on axon termini in the brain. Science 304:1468

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rimai DS (2016) Patent Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Langevin A, Riopel D (eds) (2005) Logistics Systems: Design and Optimization. Springer US, Boston, MA

A chapter in an edited book

Binz PA, Muller M, Walther D, et al (2005) Signal Traitment and Virtual Images Production (1/2). In: Bienvenut WV (ed) Acceleration and Improvement of Protein Identification by Mass Spectrometry. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 151–168

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

Andrew E (2014) Meet The Amoeba That Eats Your Brain. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/meet-amoeba-eats-your-brain/. 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 (1986) ADP Acquisitions: Immigration and Naturalization Service Should Terminate Its Contract and Recompete. 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

Masuyama G (2010) The Bird Is A Word. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Cowley S, Corkery M (2017) After Scandal, Wells Fargo’s Board Faces a Contentious Re-election Vote. New York Times B1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Martin 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Hochedlinger and Jaenisch 2002; Martin 2011).

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

Two authors: (Hochedlinger and Jaenisch 2002)
Three or more authors: (Barnea et al. 2004)

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