How to format your references using the BioEssays citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BioEssays. 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

Begun, D. R. (2004). Anthropology. The earliest hominins--is less more? Science (New York, N.Y.), 303(5663), 1478–1480.

A journal article with 2 authors

von Messling, V., & Cattaneo, R. (2012). Virology. A henipavirus vaccine in sight. Science (New York, N.Y.), 337(6095), 651–652.

A journal article with 3 authors

Goddard, M. R., Godfray, H. C. J., & Burt, A. (2005). Sex increases the efficacy of natural selection in experimental yeast populations. Nature, 434(7033), 636–640.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Liu, J., Carmell, M. A., Rivas, F. V., Marsden, C. G., Thomson, J. M., Song, J.-J., Hammond, S. M., Joshua-Tor, L., & Hannon, G. J. (2004). Argonaute2 is the catalytic engine of mammalian RNAi. Science (New York, N.Y.), 305(5689), 1437–1441.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

André, É., & Soulat, R. (2013). The Inverse Method. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Ganter, B. (2016). Conceptual Exploration (S. Obiedkov, Ed.). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Khalilpour, K. R., & Vassallo, A. (2016). Sensitivity Analysis of Grid-Connected PV-Battery Systems. In A. Vassallo (Ed.), Community Energy Networks With Storage: Modeling Frameworks for Distributed Generation (pp. 83–97). Springer.

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 BioEssays.

Blog post

Taub, B. (2016, June 1). Opioid Painkillers May Actually Make You More Sensitive To Pain. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/opioid-painkillers-may-actually-make-you-more-sensitive-pain/

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. (1991). FAA Budget: Key Issues in Facilities and Equipment and Operations Accounts Need Resolution (T-RCED-91-63). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Ma, Y. (2013). Vesicular Stomatitis Virus as a Vector to Deliver Virus-Like Particles of Human Norovirus: A New Live Vectored Vaccine for Human Norovirus [Doctoral dissertation]. Ohio State University.

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

George, N. (2013, September 22). Red and Black. New York Times, BR12.

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	BioEssays
Abbreviation	Bioessays
ISSN (print)	0265-9247
ISSN (online)	1521-1878
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology