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

Speakman JR (2010) FTO effect on energy demand versus food intake. Nature 464:E1; discussion E2

A journal article with 2 authors

Verdun RE, Karlseder J (2007) Replication and protection of telomeres. Nature 447:924–931

A journal article with 3 authors

Schmidt D, Jiang Q-X, MacKinnon R (2006) Phospholipids and the origin of cationic gating charges in voltage sensors. Nature 444:775–779

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Bukowski MR, Koehntop KD, Stubna A, et al (2005) A thiolate-ligated nonheme oxoiron(IV) complex relevant to cytochrome P450. Science 310:1000–1002

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Murti Y, Vijayan C (2014) Essentials of Nonlinear Optics. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Drexl J, Grosse Ruse-Khan H, Nadde-Phlix S (eds) (2014) EU Bilateral Trade Agreements and Intellectual Property: For Better or Worse? Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Smith JEH (2013) Heat, Action, Perception: Models of Living Beings in German Medical Cartesianism. In: Dobre M, Nyden T (eds) Cartesian Empiricisms. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 105–123

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 (2015) Scientists Develop Pill That Could Let Celiacs Eat Gluten. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/pill-developed-could-let-celiacs-eat-gluten/. 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 (1983) U.S. Government Actions Affecting Rice Sales to Korea. 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

Vestergaard EV (2015) The shadow in Latvian mythological legends: A Jungian perspective. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute

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

Greenhouse L (2008) Justices Narrow Money-Laundering Law. New York Times A15

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Speakman 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Verdun and Karlseder 2007; Speakman 2010).

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

Two authors: (Verdun and Karlseder 2007)
Three or more authors: (Bukowski et al. 2005)

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

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