How to format your references using the Biochemical Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biochemical Journal (BCJ). 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

Fischer, D. (2012) Planetary science: early start for rocky planets. Nature 486, 331–332

A journal article with 2 authors

McLaughlin, S. and Murray, D. (2005) Plasma membrane phosphoinositide organization by protein electrostatics. Nature 438, 605–611

A journal article with 3 authors

Schnupp, J. W., Mrsic-Flogel, T. D. and King, A. J. (2001) Linear processing of spatial cues in primary auditory cortex. Nature 414, 200–204

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Rudenko, G., Henry, L., Henderson, K., Ichtchenko, K., Brown, M. S., Goldstein, J. L., et al. (2002) Structure of the LDL receptor extracellular domain at endosomal pH. Science 298, 2353–2358

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Baldi, P., Frasconi, P. and Smyth, P. (2002) Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Kozarek, R., Chiorean, M. and Wallace, M. (Eds.). (2015) Endoscopy in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Pande, A. and Zambreno, J. (2013) Polymorphic Wavelet Transform. In Embedded Multimedia Security Systems: Algorithms and Architectures (Zambreno, J., ed.), pp 33–65, Springer, London

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 Biochemical Journal.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, June 12) What Will Earth Look Like 100 Million Years From Now? IFLScience, IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/space/what-will-earth-look-100-million-years-now/

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. (1994) Early Childhood Programs: Parent Education and Income Best Predict Participation, 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

Prasad, H. (2017) Removing a Thorn with a Thorn: Evaluating India’s Use of Militias in Counterinsurgency, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, DC

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

Macfarlane, I. (1906, March 17) Wordsworth. New York Times

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	Biochemical Journal
Abbreviation	Biochem. J.
ISSN (print)	0264-6021
ISSN (online)	1470-8728
Scope	Biochemistry Cell Biology Molecular Biology