How to format your references using the RNA citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for RNA. 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	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Masocha W. 2014. Paclitaxel-induced hyposensitivity to nociceptive chemical stimulation in mice can be prevented by treatment with minocycline. Sci Rep 4: 6719.

A journal article with 2 authors

King DA, Thomas SM. 2007. Science and government. Taking science out of the box--foresight recast. Science 316: 1701–1702.

A journal article with 3 authors

Grosman C, Zhou M, Auerbach A. 2000. Mapping the conformational wave of acetylcholine receptor channel gating. Nature 403: 773–776.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Gandhi DD, Lane M, Zhou Y, Singh AP, Nayak S, Tisch U, Eizenberg M, Ramanath G. 2007. Annealing-induced interfacial toughening using a molecular nanolayer. Nature 447: 299–302.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bleistein S. 2017. Rapid Organizational Change. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Wyeld T, Calder P, Shen H, eds. 2015. Computer-Human Interaction. Cognitive Effects of Spatial Interaction, Learning, and Ability: 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, OzCHI 2013, Adelaide, SA, Australia, November 25-29, 2013. Revised and Extended Papers. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Gu L, Zhou M, Kang Q, Zhou A. 2015. A Scalable Framework for Universal Data Generation in Parallel. In Performance Characterization and Benchmarking. Traditional to Big Data: 6th TPC Technology Conference, TPCTC 2014, Hangzhou, China, September 1--5, 2014. Revised Selected Papers (eds. R. Nambiar and M. Poess), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 64–81, Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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 RNA.

Blog post

Luntz S. 2017. SkyGlow Project Captures Stunning Time-Lapse Of Grand Canyon Cloud Inversion. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/skyglow-project-captures-stunning-timelapse-of-grand-canyon-cloud-inversion/ (Accessed October 30, 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. 2004. Highways and Transit: Private Sector Sponsorship of and Investment in Major Projects Has Been Limited. 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

Boylan M. 2010. Acute physiological resonses to yoga activity in a hot environment. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Dominus S. 2016. They Were With Her From the Very Start. New York Times, December 24.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Masocha 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Masocha 2014; King and Thomas 2007).

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

Two authors: (King and Thomas 2007)
Three or more authors: (Gandhi et al. 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	RNA
Abbreviation	RNA
ISSN (print)	1335-8382
ISSN (online)	1469-9001
Scope	Molecular Biology