How to format your references using the Acta Biotheoretica citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Acta Biotheoretica. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX 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

Kurita N (2012) Climate change. Dancing to the tune of the glacial cycles. Science 336:1242–1243

A journal article with 2 authors

Philpotts AR, Dickson LD (2000) The formation of plagioclase chains during convective transfer in basaltic magma. Nature 406:59–61

A journal article with 3 authors

Holland RA, Wikelski M, Wilcove DS (2006) How and why do insects migrate? Science 313:794–796

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Stuber GD, Klanker M, de Ridder B, et al (2008) Reward-predictive cues enhance excitatory synaptic strength onto midbrain dopamine neurons. Science 321:1690–1692

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smith CL (2009) Basic Process Measurements. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Noor NM, Montiel CJ (eds) (2009) Peace Psychology in Asia. Springer US, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Taminau J, Meganck S, Lazar C, et al (2010) Sequential Application of Feature Selection and Extraction for Predicting Breast Cancer Aggressiveness. In: Chan JH, Ong Y-S, Cho S-B (eds) Computational Systems-Biology and Bioinformatics: First International Conference, CSBio 2010, Bangkok, Thailand, November 3-5, 2010. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 46–57

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 Acta Biotheoretica.

Blog post

O`Callaghan J (2015) Did Shakespeare Smoke Weed? In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/did-shakespeare-smoke-weed-pipe-residue-suggests-playwright-used-cannabis/. 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 (2003) Air Traffic Control: FAA’s Modernization Efforts--Past, Present, and Future. 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

Currano LJ (2010) Latching microelectromechanical shock sensor systems: Design, modeling, and experiments. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Cave D (2017) Making History With Breast-Fed Meal in Parliament. New York Times A6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kurita 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Philpotts and Dickson 2000; Kurita 2012).

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

Two authors: (Philpotts and Dickson 2000)
Three or more authors: (Stuber et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Acta Biotheoretica
Abbreviation	Acta Biotheor.
ISSN (print)	0001-5342
ISSN (online)	1572-8358
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Philosophy General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology General Environmental Science Applied Mathematics General Medicine