How to format your references using the Royal Society Open Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Royal Society Open Science. 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 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

Reich JG. 2002 Embryonic stem cells. The debate in Germany. Science 296, 265.

A journal article with 2 authors

Melott AL, Thomas BC. 2012 Causes of an ad 774-775 14C increase. Nature 491, E1-2.

A journal article with 3 authors

Angelakis DG, Das P, Noh C. 2014 Probing the topological properties of the Jackiw-Rebbi model with light. Sci. Rep. 4, 6110.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Pruneda-Paz JL, Breton G, Para A, Kay SA. 2009 A functional genomics approach reveals CHE as a component of the Arabidopsis circadian clock. Science 323, 1481–1485.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dinçer İ, Zamfirescu C. 2015 Drying Phenomena. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Dingel J, Solberg A, editors. 2011 Models in Software Engineering: Workshops and Symposia at MODELS 2010, Oslo, Norway, October 2-8, 2010, Reports and Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Al-Sharif R, Guyeux C, Fadil YA, Makhoul A, Jaber A. 2014 On the Usefulness of Information Hiding Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks Security. In Ad Hoc Networks: 6th International ICST Conference, ADHOCNETS 2014, Rhodes, Greece, August 18-19, 2014, Revised Selected Papers (eds N Mitton, A Gallais, ME Kantarci, S Papavassiliou), pp. 51–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Royal Society Open Science.

Blog post

Carpineti A. 2016 First ‘Wind Nebula’ Seen Around a Magnetar. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/space/first-wind-nebula-seen-around-a-magnetar/ (accessed on 30 October 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. 2009 Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellites: With Costs Increasing and Data Continuity at Risk, Improvements Needed in Tri-agency Decision Making.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Holmes K. 2008 Ethical practice online: An exploration of provider liability risk among practitioners in the emerging field of online therapy. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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. 2009 32 Voices Louder Than Limbaugh’s. New York Times, 13 October. , B12.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Royal Society Open Science
Abbreviation	R. Soc. Open Sci.
ISSN (online)	2054-5703
Scope