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 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

Kerr RA (2000) PLANETARY SCIENCE: Saturn Wins Satellite Title With New Moons. Science 290:689a

A journal article with 2 authors

Kurita R, Tanaka H (2004) Critical-like phenomena associated with liquid-liquid transition in a molecular liquid. Science 306:845–848

A journal article with 3 authors

Cremer S, Sledge MF, Heinze J (2002) Chemical mimicry: male ants disguised by the queen’s bouquet. Nature 419:897

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Liu KSY, Siebert M, Mertel S, et al (2011) RIM-binding protein, a central part of the active zone, is essential for neurotransmitter release. Science 334:1565–1569

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Etheridge D (2010) Excel® Data Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Pumain D (ed) (2006) Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Sneed HM (2014) Dealing with Technical Debt in Agile Development Projects. In: Winkler D, Biffl S, Bergsmann J (eds) Software Quality. Model-Based Approaches for Advanced Software and Systems Engineering: 6th International Conference, SWQD 2014, Vienna, Austria, January 14-16, 2014. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 48–62

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

Davis J (2017) Attractive Scientists Are Deemed More Interesting But Less Competent By The Public. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/attractive-scientists-are-deemed-more-interesting-but-less-competent-by-the-public/. 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 (1972) Heroin Hotline. 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

Nasiriamini S (2010) The need for adaptive network application architectures. 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

Crow K (2003) You Talkin’ to Me? Less and Less These Days. New York Times 146

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kerr 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Kerr 2000; Kurita and Tanaka 2004).

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

Two authors: (Kurita and Tanaka 2004)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al. 2011)

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