How to format your references using the Biologicals citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
[1]
Fortini ME. Medicine. Anticipating trouble from gene transcription. Science 2007;315:1800–1.
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
Taylor PG, Townsend AR. Stoichiometric control of organic carbon-nitrate relationships from soils to the sea. Nature 2010;464:1178–81.
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
Winkler W, Nahvi A, Breaker RR. Thiamine derivatives bind messenger RNAs directly to regulate bacterial gene expression. Nature 2002;419:952–6.
A journal article with 7 or more authors
[1]
Gross T, Rudolf L, Levin SA, Dieckmann U. Generalized models reveal stabilizing factors in food webs. Science 2009;325:747–50.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
Burd B. Java® For Dummies®. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc.; 2011.
An edited book
[1]
Cheema SK, editor. Biochemistry of Atherosclerosis. Boston, MA: Springer US; 2006.
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
Leu G, Namatame A. Evolving Failure Resilience in Scale-Free Networks. In: Gen M, Green D, Katai O, McKay B, Namatame A, Sarker RA, et al., editors. Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009, p. 49–59.

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 Biologicals.

Blog post
[1]
Hamilton K. Why Health Implants Should Have Open Source Code. IFLScience 2016. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/why-health-implants-should-have-open-source-code/ (accessed October 30, 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
[1]
Government Accountability Office. Education Authority To Charge Student Financial Aid Application Fees. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1982.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
[1]
Altebarmakian T. Salt of the Skin. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach, 2012.

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
[1]
Alvarez L. Pandemonium Followed Rumor of Second Airport Attacker. New York Times 2017:A9.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal titleBiologicals
AbbreviationBiologicals
ISSN (print)1045-1056
ScopeBiotechnology
Bioengineering
General Immunology and Microbiology
Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
General Medicine
Pharmacology

Other styles