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

Bosch,X. (2000) Spain in quandary over French synchrotron. Nature, 405, 604.

A journal article with 2 authors

Vojvodic,A. and Nørskov,J.K. (2011) Chemistry. Optimizing perovskites for the water-splitting reaction. Science, 334, 1355–1356.

A journal article with 3 authors

Matzke,M. et al. (2001) RNA: guiding gene silencing. Science, 293, 1080–1083.

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Dressaire,E. et al. (2008) Interfacial polygonal nanopatterning of stable microbubbles. Science, 320, 1198–1201.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stevenson,O. (2008) Neglected Children and Their Families Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Emmer,M. ed. (2006) Matematica e Cultura 2006 Springer, Milano.

A chapter in an edited book

Videira,A.A.P. (2014) Poincaré, Indifferent Hypotheses and Metaphysics. In, de Paz,M. and DiSalle,R. (eds), Poincaré, Philosopher of Science: Problems and Perspectives, The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 67–79.

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

Andrew,E. (2015) A Handshake In Space Changed US-Russia Relations: How Long Will It Last? 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 (1981) National Research Centers Supported by NSF 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

Escalante-Guerra,M. (2009) Policy analysis proposal regarding the Adoptions and Safe Family Act of 1997.

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

Donadio,R. (2017) Visa Ban Leaves Artists in Limbo. New York Times, C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Bosch, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Bosch, 2000; Vojvodic and Nørskov, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Vojvodic and Nørskov, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Dressaire et al., 2008)

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