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. 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

Flicek, P. (2010) Journal club. A computational geneticist looks at mechanisms of chromosomal evolution. Nature 463, 713.

A journal article with 2 authors

Montagner, J. P. and Ritsema, J. (2001) Geology. Interactions between ridges and plumes. Science 294, 1472–1473.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dominguez, P., Jacobson, A. G. and Jefferies, R. P. S. (2002) Paired gill slits in a fossil with a calcite skeleton. Nature 417, 841–844.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Merz, J. F., Kriss, A. G., Leonard, D. G. B. and Cho, M. K. (2002) Diagnostic testing fails the test. Nature 415, 577–579.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Borisenko, V. E. and Ossicini, S. (2012) What is What in the Nanoworld, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Steel, G. (Ed.). (2016) Power in Contemporary Japan, Palgrave Macmillan US, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Wang, X. and Reeves, D. (2015) Active Timing Based Traceback. In Traceback and Anonymity (Reeves, D., ed.), pp 23–47, Springer, New York, NY.

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

Carpineti, A. (2017, January 18) Brand New Observations Of The Sun Show A Turtle-Shaped Spot. IFLScience, IFLScience.

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. (2013) Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Standards Needed to Improve Identification of Racial and Ethnic Overrepresentation in Special Education, 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

Adaligil, E. (2010) Electron transfer through self-assembled monolayers of alkaneselenols and alkanethiols on mercury electrode, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Lavin, L. (2017, September 26) I Sang in New York. 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

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