How to format your references using the Biochemical Systematics and Ecology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biochemical Systematics and Ecology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
DeWeerdt, S., 2013. Bacteriology: a caring culture. Nature 504, S4-5.
A journal article with 2 authors
Andersson, A.F., Banfield, J.F., 2008. Virus population dynamics and acquired virus resistance in natural microbial communities. Science 320, 1047–1050.
A journal article with 3 authors
Zhang, Y.V., Ni, J., Montell, C., 2013. The molecular basis for attractive salt-taste coding in Drosophila. Science 340, 1334–1338.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Timpson, N., Heron, J., Smith, G.D., Enard, W., 2007. Comment on papers by Evans et al. and Mekel-Bobrov et al. on Evidence for Positive Selection of MCPH1 and ASPM. Science 317, 1036; author reply 1036.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
MacGowan, C., 2011. The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
An edited book
Marcus, A. (Ed.), 2014. Design, User Experience, and Usability. User Experience Design for Diverse Interaction Platforms and Environments: Third International Conference, DUXU 2014, Held as Part of HCI International 2014, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 22-27, 2014, Proceedings, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
A chapter in an edited book
Ren, W., Song, J., Ma, Z., Huang, S., 2009. Towards a Bio-inspired Security Framework for Mission-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks, in: Cai, Z., Li, Z., Kang, Z., Liu, Y. (Eds.), Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Systems: 4th International Symposium, ISICA 2009, Huangshi, China, October 23-25, 2009. Proceedings, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 35–44.

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 Systematics and Ecology.

Blog post
Davis, J., 2016. Paris Climate Deal Nears Finishing Line As UK Announces It Will Ratify Agreement [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/environment/paris-climate-deal-nears-finishing-line-as-uk-announces-it-will-ratify-agreement/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2016. Genetically Engineered Crops: USDA Needs to Enhance Oversight and Better Understand Impacts of Unintended Mixing with Other Crops (No. GAO-16-241). 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
Primeaux, S.J., 2014. The Role of Education, Empathy, and Psychological Flexibility in Implicit and Explicit Mental Health Stigma (Doctoral dissertation). University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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
Casey, N., Abad, S., 2017. Pope Urges Colombians To Accept Peace Accord. New York Times A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (DeWeerdt, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Andersson and Banfield, 2008; DeWeerdt, 2013).

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

  • Two authors: (Andersson and Banfield, 2008)
  • Three or more authors: (Timpson et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal titleBiochemical Systematics and Ecology
AbbreviationBiochem. Syst. Ecol.
ISSN (print)0305-1978
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Biochemistry

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