How to format your references using the Biological Theory citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biological Theory. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

McGraw R (2004) Humidity, ice, and nitric acid. Science 304:961–3; author reply 961-3

A journal article with 2 authors

Medley GF, Nokes DJ (2009) Epidemiology. Does viral diversity matter? Science 325:274–275

A journal article with 3 authors

Cheng N, Tsunenari T, Yau K-W (2009) Intrinsic light response of retinal horizontal cells of teleosts. Nature 460:899–903

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Isberg J, Hammersberg J, Johansson E, et al (2002) High carrier mobility in single-crystal plasma-deposited diamond. Science 297:1670–1672

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Polushkin V (2005) Nuclear Electronics. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Iskra J (ed) (2012) Halogenated Heterocycles: Synthesis, Application and Environment. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Marés J, Torra V (2013) On the Protection of Social Network-Extracted Categorical Microdata. In: Nin J, Villatoro D (eds) Citizen in Sensor Networks: First International Workshop, CitiSens 2012, Montpellier, France, August 27, 2012, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 33–42

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 Theory.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Our Peripheral Vision Is Far More Sophisticated Than We Thought. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/our-peripheral-vision-far-more-sophisticated-we-thought/. 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 (2009) NASA: Constellation Program Cost and Schedule Will Remain Uncertain Until a Sound Business Case Is Established. 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

Al Hashimi H (2017) Local Measurement and Characterization via Fluorescing Materials for Phase Change Heat Transfer Applications. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park

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

Pilon M (2012) Running the World With Eyes Wide Open. New York Times B10

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McGraw 2004).
This sentence cites two references (McGraw 2004; Medley and Nokes 2009).

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

Two authors: (Medley and Nokes 2009)
Three or more authors: (Isberg et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biological Theory
Abbreviation	Biol. Theory
ISSN (print)	1555-5542
ISSN (online)	1555-5550
Scope