How to format your references using the Bioinformatics citation style

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

McCaffrey,R. (2007) Geophysics. The next great earthquake. Science, 315, 1675–1676.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rykaczewski,R.R. and Dunne,J.P. (2011) A measured look at ocean chlorophyll trends. Nature, 472, E5-6; discussion E8-9.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wechsler,T. et al. (2011) Aberrant chromosome morphology in human cells defective for Holliday junction resolution. Nature, 471, 642–646.

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Takemaru,K.-I. et al. (2003) Chibby, a nuclear beta-catenin-associated antagonist of the Wnt/Wingless pathway. Nature, 422, 905–909.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Ni,Z. et al. (2014) Haptic Feedback Teleoperation of Optical Tweezers John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Katarzyniak,R. et al. eds. (2011) Semantic Methods for Knowledge Management and Communication Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Kiayias,A. and Pehlivanoglu,S. (2010) Trace and Revoke Schemes. In, Pehlivanoglu,S. (ed), Encryption for Digital Content, Advances in Information Security. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp. 151–169.

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 Bioinformatics.

Blog post

Taub,B. (2016) Researchers Take Steps Towards Developing A ‘Universal’ Vaccine To Cure All Cancers. 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 (1998) Elementary and Secondary Education: Ed-Flex States Vary in Implementation of Waiver Process 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

Yaceczko,S.D. (2017) A Telehealth Nutrition Manual for an Online Intensive Behavioral Weight Management Program.

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

Goldstein,J. (2014) Mayor’s Call Did Not Prompt Pastor’s Release, Police Say. New York Times, A20.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McCaffrey, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (McCaffrey, 2007; Rykaczewski and Dunne, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Rykaczewski and Dunne, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Takemaru et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Bioinformatics
Abbreviation	Comput. Appl. Biosci.
ISSN (print)	1367-4803
ISSN (online)	1460-2059
Scope	Biochemistry Molecular Biology Computational Theory and Mathematics Computer Science Applications Computational Mathematics Statistics and Probability