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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Krull, W. (2015) Hubert Markl (1938-2015). Nature 518, 168

A journal article with 2 authors

Owen-Hughes, T. and Bruno, M. (2004) Molecular biology. Breaking the silence. Science 303, 324–325

A journal article with 3 authors

Munsky, B., Neuert, G. and van Oudenaarden, A. (2012) Using gene expression noise to understand gene regulation. Science 336, 183–187

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Rui, G., Abeysinghe, D. C., Nelson, R. L. and Zhan, Q. (2013) Demonstration of beam steering via dipole-coupled plasmonic spiral antenna. Sci. Rep. 3, 2237

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Laykin, E. (2013) Investigative Computer Forensics, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Huang, Y. A. (2006) Acoustic MIMO Signal Processing (Chen, J., and Benesty, J., eds.), Springer US, Boston, MA

A chapter in an edited book

Domínguez-Rodrigo, M. and Barba, R. (2007) New estimates of tooth-mark and percussion-mark frequencies at the FLK Zinjanthropus level: the carn. In Deconstructing Olduvai: A Taphonomic Study of the Bed I Sites (Egido, R. B., and Egeland, C. P., eds.), pp 39–74, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

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

Hale, T. (2016, May 9) Can You Figure Out Where The “Missing Coin” Goes In This Viral Brain Teaser? IFLScience, IFLScience https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/can-you-figure-out-missing-coin-brain-teaser/

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. (1969) Administration and Control of Procurement and Utilization of Automatic Data Processing, 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

Pierre, R. R. (2019) A Phenomenological Study of the Boomerang-Employment Experience of Scientists and Engineers, 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

Rosenberg, E. and Stack, L. (2017, May 18) Times Square Chaos as Driver Kills a Woman and Injures 22. 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