How to format your references using the Biological Reviews citation style

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

Sohi, S.P. (2012) Agriculture. Carbon storage with benefits. Science (New York, N.Y.) 338, 1034–1035.

A journal article with 2 authors

Steinman, R.M. & Mellman, I. (2004) Immunotherapy: bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more. Science (New York, N.Y.) 305, 197–200.

A journal article with 3 authors

Cordier, P., Amodeo, J. & Carrez, P. (2012) Modelling the rheology of MgO under Earth’s mantle pressure, temperature and strain rates. Nature 481, 177–180.

A journal article with 16 or more authors

Zhang, J., Yan, S., Sluyter, R., Li, W., Alici, G. & Nguyen, N.-T. (2014) Inertial particle separation by differential equilibrium positions in a symmetrical serpentine micro-channel. Scientific reports 4, 4527.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geotechni, Laackmann, K., Balthaus, H., Braach, O., Friebel, W.-D., Hettler, A., Maidl, B., Meissner, M., Schuck, W., Schwaiger, S., Stephan, D., Thewes, M. & Wittke-Schmitt, B. (2015) Taschenbuch für den Tunnelbau 2015. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

Bergemann, N. & Riecher-Rössler, A. (eds) (2005) Estrogen Effects in Psychiatric Disorders. Springer, Vienna.

A chapter in an edited book

Nikolenko, S. (2015) SVD-LDA: Topic Modeling for Full-Text Recommender Systems. In Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications: 14th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2015, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, October 25-31, 2015, Proceedings, Part II (eds O. Pichardo Lagunas, O. Herrera Alcántara & G. Arroyo Figueroa), pp. 67–79. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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 Reviews.

Blog post

Andrews, R. (2016) Why Do Women Have Orgasms? IFLScience. 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 (1986) Weather Satellites: User Views on the Consequences of Eliminating a Civilian Polar Orbiter. 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

Tapal, S.S. (2012) Is the fourth generation of Six Sigma an effective professional development model in K-12 education? Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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

Protess, B. & Apuzzo, M. (2017) Tougher on Corporate Crime. For Now. New York Times, B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sohi, 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Steinman & Mellman, 2004; Sohi, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Steinman & Mellman, 2004)
Three authors: (Cordier, Amodeo & Carrez, 2012)
4 or more authors: (Zhang et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biological Reviews
Abbreviation	Biol. Rev. Camb. Philos. Soc.
ISSN (print)	1464-7931
ISSN (online)	1469-185X
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology