How to format your references using the Scientific African citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Scientific African. 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

[1]

V. Gewin, Putting pen to paper, Nature 432 (2004) 418–419.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J.L. Dangl, J.D. Jones, Plant pathogens and integrated defence responses to infection, Nature 411 (2001) 826–833.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Y.-Y. Liu, J.-J. Slotine, A.-L. Barabási, Controllability of complex networks, Nature 473 (2011) 167–173.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Mondal, A. Kamlapure, S.C. Ganguli, J. Jesudasan, V. Bagwe, L. Benfatto, P. Raychaudhuri, Enhancement of the finite-frequency superfluid response in the pseudogap regime of strongly disordered superconducting films, Sci. Rep. 3 (2013) 1357.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

K. Hinkelmann, O. Kempthorne, Design and Analysis of Experiments: Advanced Experimental Design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

G. López-Campos, Microarray Detection and Characterization of Bacterial Foodborne Pathogens, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

C. Knauer, A. Spillner, A Fixed-Parameter Algorithm for the Minimum Weight Triangulation Problem Based on Small Graph Separators, in: F.V. Fomin (Ed.), Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science: 32nd International Workshop, WG 2006, Bergen, Norway, June 22-24, 2006 Revised Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006: pp. 49–57.

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 Scientific African.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Meat is a Complex Health Issue but a Simple Climate one: the World Needs to Eat Less of it, IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/environment/meat-complex-health-issue-simple-climate-one-world-needs-eat-less-it/ (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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, NASA: Interest Earned on Letter of Credit Funds, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

K.A. Moss, The Development and Diffusion of the Cult of Isis in the Hellenistic Period, Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 2017.

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

[1]

K. Taylor, Named Next President of N.Y.U., Oxford’s Leader Inherits Challenges, New York Times (2015) A20.

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	Scientific African
ISSN (print)	2468-2276
Scope