How to format your references using the Amino Acids citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Amino Acids. 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	Download the output style file
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

Klarreich E (2001) Top researchers plan to snub fertility conference. Nature 413:241

A journal article with 2 authors

Hartonen T, Alava MJ (2013) How important tasks are performed: peer review. Sci Rep 3:1679

A journal article with 3 authors

Zanardi I, Zifarelli G, Pusch M (2013) An optical assay of the transport activity of ClC-7. Sci Rep 3:1231

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Huang CY, Kuchel H, Edwards J, et al (2013) A DNA-based method for studying root responses to drought in field-grown wheat genotypes. Sci Rep 3:3194

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

El-Reedy MA (2011) Construction Management for Industrial Projects. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Nava S (2010) Ventilazione meccanica non invasiva: Come, quando e perché. Springer, Milano

A chapter in an edited book

Chatzikokolakis K, Palamidessi C (2007) Making Random Choices Invisible to the Scheduler. In: Caires L, Vasconcelos VT (eds) CONCUR 2007 – Concurrency Theory: 18th International Conference, CONCUR 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, September 3-8, 2007. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 42–58

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 Amino Acids.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Ebola Claims Lives of Five Study Co-Authors Before Paper Is Published. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/ebola-claims-lives-five-study-co-authors-paper-published/. 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 (2013) Preliminary Results of Work on FAA Facility Conditions and Workplace Safety. 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

Lefebvre K (2017) Racial Prejudice, Individualism, and Political Identity: Understanding the Forty-Year Trend of Anti-Welfare Spending Preferences. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University

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

Hodgman J (2017) Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman. New York Times MM26

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Klarreich 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Klarreich 2001; Hartonen and Alava 2013).

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

Two authors: (Hartonen and Alava 2013)
Three or more authors: (Huang et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Amino Acids
Abbreviation	Amino Acids
ISSN (print)	0939-4451
ISSN (online)	1438-2199
Scope	Biochemistry Clinical Biochemistry Organic Chemistry