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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Owens B (2014) Cell physiology: The changing colour of fat. Nature 508:S52-3
A journal article with 2 authors
Galonić DP, Gin DY (2007) Chemical glycosylation in the synthesis of glycoconjugate antitumour vaccines. Nature 446:1000–1007
A journal article with 3 authors
Zhao B, Moore JS, Beebe DJ (2001) Surface-directed liquid flow inside microchannels. Science 291:1023–1026
A journal article with 5 or more authors
Homma T, Ishibashi D, Nakagaki T, et al (2014) Persistent prion infection disturbs the function of Oct-1, resulting in the down-regulation of murine interferon regulatory factor-3. Sci Rep 4:6006

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Walke B, Seidenberg R, Althoff MP (2005) UMTS. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK
An edited book
Krickeberg K (2012) Epidemiology: Key to Prevention. Springer, New York, NY
A chapter in an edited book
Mak J, Faxén K-F, Janson S, Mycroft A (2010) Estimating and Exploiting Potential Parallelism by Source-Level Dependence Profiling. In: D’Ambra P, Guarracino M, Talia D (eds) Euro-Par 2010 - Parallel Processing: 16th International Euro-Par Conference, Ischia, Italy, August 31 - September 3, 2010, Proceedings, Part I. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 26–37

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 (2015) Delving Deep Into Caves Can Teach Us About Climate Past And Present. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/delving-deep-caves-can-teach-us-about-climate-past-and-present/. 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 (2011) Information Security: State Has Taken Steps to Implement a Continuous Monitoring Application, but Key Challenges Remain. 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
Sheldon A (2010) The impact of power restoration and narcissism on aggression. 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
Rao T (2016) Cool Ranch. New York Times MM30

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Owens 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Galonić and Gin 2007; Owens 2014).

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

  • Two authors: (Galonić and Gin 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Homma et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleThe Science of Nature
AbbreviationSci. Nat.
ISSN (print)0028-1042
ISSN (online)1432-1904
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
General Medicine

Other styles
https://paperpile.com/s/the-science-of-nature-citation-style/
paperpile.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-22
29705
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UMH2U73NCFTXDCOFXH5WUUNOTKHATMGK
<urn:uuid:5d0a52a3-3f1a-4ef6-a745-8119527572ee>
2019-05-22T09:26:24Z
34.201.189.153
text/html
sha1:KL6ZFL5PDEXLERBY6ZQDUNSJ7NWP72EH
<urn:uuid:91b8862f-0791-4597-b6bd-c732e00264aa>
https://paperpile.com/s/the-science-of-nature-citation-style/
response
<urn:uuid:0374fe66-b637-417e-a2f1-d25168d8299e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-22
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-113-197-177.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/