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

Reichhardt T (2005) Pumping up the volume. Nature 436:326–327

A journal article with 2 authors

Yea SS, Fruman DA (2011) Cell signaling. New mTOR targets Grb attention. Science 332:1270–1271

A journal article with 3 authors

Wellman CH, Osterloff PL, Mohiuddin U (2003) Fragments of the earliest land plants. Nature 425:282–285

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zeng W, Wharton KA Jr, Mack JA, et al (2000) naked cuticle encodes an inducible antagonist of Wnt signalling. Nature 403:789–795

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Goria S (2017) Methods and Tools for Creative Competitive Intelligence. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Khouzani M, Panaousis E, Theodorakopoulos G (eds) (2015) Decision and Game Theory for Security: 6th International Conference, GameSec 2015, London, UK, November 4-5, 2015, Proceedings, 1st ed. 2015. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Crumeyrolle-Arias M, Medvedev A, Cardona A, et al (2007) Endogenous oxidized indoles share inhibitory potency against [3H]isatin binding in rat brain. In: Gerlach M, Deckert J, Double K, Koutsilieri E (eds) Neuropsychiatric Disorders An Integrative Approach. Springer, Vienna, pp 29–34

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

Andrews R (2017) We Now Know What Earth’s Inner Core Is Made Of. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/earths-inner-core-made-of/. 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 (1990) Problems Persist in Justice’s ADP Management and Organizations. 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

Diggs BJ (2017) African American Online Doctor of Management Students’ Perceptions of Dissertation Writing and Support: Narrative Inquiry. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

Kelly K, Rappeport A (2017) Trump’s Tax Cut Could Lead to Broad Avoidance. New York Times A17

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Reichhardt 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Reichhardt 2005; Yea and Fruman 2011).

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

Two authors: (Yea and Fruman 2011)
Three or more authors: (Zeng et al. 2000)

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