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

Watanabe,M. (2003) A developing theme for AIDS. Nature, 426, 736–737.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tao,Y.J. and Zheng,W. (2012) Biochemistry. Visualizing the influenza genome. Science, 338, 1545–1546.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kuzuyama,T. et al. (2005) Structural basis for the promiscuous biosynthetic prenylation of aromatic natural products. Nature, 435, 983–987.

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Strogatz,S.H. et al. (2005) Theoretical mechanics: crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge. Nature, 438, 43–44.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Young,S. and Smith,J. (2017) Helping Children with ADHD John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Abetz,V. ed. (2005) Block Copolymers II Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Barkeshli,K. and Khorasani,S. (2015) Radar. In, Khorasani,S. (ed), Advanced Electromagnetics and Scattering Theory. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 213–229.

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

Davis,J. (2016) July 2016 Was Officially The Hottest Month Ever On Record. 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 (1973) Bureau of Indian Affairs Contracts for Automatic Data Processing Management Services, and for Development of a Management Information System at the Colorado River Indian Reservation 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

Van Gilder,B.J. (2012) American students’ communication abroad: Factors promoting and inhibiting interactions with host nationals.

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

Robertson,C. et al. (2011) Bankruptcy Rarely Offers Easy Answer For Counties. New York Times, A15.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Watanabe, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Watanabe, 2003; Tao and Zheng, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Tao and Zheng, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Strogatz et al., 2005)

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