How to format your references using the Biological Cybernetics citation style

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

Lane N (2011) Evolution. The costs of breathing. Science 334:184–185

A journal article with 2 authors

Douvris C, Ozerov OV (2008) Hydrodefluorination of perfluoroalkyl groups using silylium-carborane catalysts. Science 321:1188–1190

A journal article with 3 authors

Kaczmarczyk A, Vorholt JA, Francez-Charlot A (2014) Synthetic vanillate-regulated promoter for graded gene expression in Sphingomonas. Sci Rep 4:6453

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Liu L, Hausladen A, Zeng M, et al (2001) A metabolic enzyme for S-nitrosothiol conserved from bacteria to humans. Nature 410:490–494

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Russell C (2006) Trustee Investment Strategy for Endowments and Foundations. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford, UK

An edited book

Talley RC, Montgomery RJV (eds) (2013) Caregiving Across the Lifespan: Research • Practice • Policy. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Anderson E, McCormack M (2016) The Gendering of Sexuality. In: McCormack M (ed) The Changing Dynamics of Bisexual Men’s Lives: Social Research Perspectives. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 69–88

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 Biological Cybernetics.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Abbott Says Australia’s Climate Target Is ‘Economically Responsible.’ In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/abbott-says-australia-s-climate-target-economically-responsible/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1994) Air Traffic Control: Status of FAA’s Modernization Program. 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

Lin H-C (2013) Depression screening in ambulatory care. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Crow K (2002) If You Can’t Stand the Name, Get Out of Hell’s Kitchen. New York Times 144

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Lane 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Douvris and Ozerov 2008; Lane 2011).

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

Two authors: (Douvris and Ozerov 2008)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biological Cybernetics
Abbreviation	Biol. Cybern.
ISSN (print)	0340-1200
ISSN (online)	1432-0770
Scope	Biotechnology General Computer Science