How to format your references using the Scientific Reports citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Scientific Reports. 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
1.
Zülicke, U. Applied physics. Ultrasmall wires get excited. Science 295, 810–811 (2002).
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Carbone, F. R. & Gebhardt, T. Immunology. A neighborhood watch upholds local immune protection. Science 346, 40–41 (2014).
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Yoshida, M.-A., Yura, K. & Ogura, A. Cephalopod eye evolution was modulated by the acquisition of Pax-6 splicing variants. Sci. Rep. 4, 4256 (2014).
A journal article with 6 or more authors
1.
Oberdoerffer, S. et al. Regulation of CD45 alternative splicing by heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein, hnRNPLL. Science 321, 686–691 (2008).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Lewis, S. Positive Psychology and Change. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016).
An edited book
1.
The Semantic Web – ISWC 2016: 15th International Semantic Web Conference, Kobe, Japan, October 17–21, 2016, Proceedings, Part I. vol. 9981 (Springer International Publishing, 2016).
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Iwasokun, G. B., Akinyokun, O. C. & Angaye, C. O. Spatial Relation Approach to Fingerprint Matching. in Intelligent Systems for Science and Information: Extended and Selected Results from the Science and Information Conference 2013 (eds. Chen, L., Kapoor, S. & Bhatia, R.) 87–110 (Springer International Publishing, 2014).

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 Reports.

Blog post
1.
Andrew, E. Cat Parasite Modified Into An Effective Cancer Vaccine. IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cat-parasite-modified-effective-cancer-vaccine/ (2014).

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. Social Security Administration’s Systems Modernization Plan. (1989).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Glover, D. Reconciling the doctrine of original sin with principles of moral responsibility. (California State University, Long Beach, 2010).

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.
Poniewozik, J. Feeding Nostalgia With a Remix. New York Times C1 (2016).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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 titleScientific Reports
AbbreviationSci. Rep.
ISSN (online)2045-2322
ScopeMultidisciplinary

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