How to format your references using the BBA - General Subjects citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BBA - General Subjects. 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

[1]

G. Marrucci, Materials science. Polymers go with the flow, Science 301 (2003) 1681–1682.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

E. Stein, M. Tessier-Lavigne, Hierarchical organization of guidance receptors: silencing of netrin attraction by slit through a Robo/DCC receptor complex, Science 291 (2001) 1928–1938.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

T. Serizawa, K.-I. Hamada, M. Akashi, Polymerization within a molecular-scale stereoregular template, Nature 429 (2004) 52–55.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Rini, R. Tobey, N. Dean, J. Itatani, Y. Tomioka, Y. Tokura, R.W. Schoenlein, A. Cavalleri, Control of the electronic phase of a manganite by mode-selective vibrational excitation, Nature 449 (2007) 72–74.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J. McBee, Mastering Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA, 2009.

An edited book

[1]

P. Perner, ed., Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition: 12th International Conference, MLDM 2016, New York, NY, USA, July 16-21, 2016, Proceedings, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

T. Di Noia, V.C. Ostuni, Recommender Systems and Linked Open Data, in: W. Faber, A. Paschke (Eds.), Reasoning Web. Web Logic Rules: 11th International Summer School 2015, Berlin, Germany, July 31- August 4, 2015, Tutorial Lectures, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015: pp. 88–113.

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 BBA - General Subjects.

Blog post

[1]

J. Fang, Birds Take Turns at the Head of Their Flying V, IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/birds-take-turns-head-their-flying-v/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites: Technical Problems, Cost Increases, and Schedule Delays Trigger Need for Difficult Trade-off Decisions, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2005.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A.A. Shabalin, Detection of low rank signals in noise and fast correlation mining with applications to large biological data, Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 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]

G. Vecsey, A Thick Résumé for a Tough Job, New York Times (2011) D6.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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 title	BBA - General Subjects
Abbreviation	Biochim. Biophys. Acta Gen. Subj.
ISSN (print)	0304-4165
Scope	Biochemistry Biophysics Molecular Biology