How to format your references using the Biology citation style

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

Simon, S.H. Physics. A Sound (and Light) Way to Measure Confined Electrons. Science 2009, 324, 1022–1023.

A journal article with 2 authors

Haussecker, D.; Kay, M.A. RNA Interference. Drugging RNAi. Science 2015, 347, 1069–1070.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bushey, D.; Tononi, G.; Cirelli, C. Sleep and Synaptic Homeostasis: Structural Evidence in Drosophila. Science 2011, 332, 1576–1581.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Slota, M.; Keerthi, A.; Myers, W.K.; Tretyakov, E.; Baumgarten, M.; Ardavan, A.; Sadeghi, H.; Lambert, C.J.; Narita, A.; Müllen, K.; et al. Magnetic Edge States and Coherent Manipulation of Graphene Nanoribbons. Nature 2018, 557, 691–695.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Anderson, D. TKO Hiring!; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2007; ISBN 9781118255964.

An edited book

Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction: 5th International Workshop, MLMI 2008, Utrecht, The Netherlands, September 8-10, 2008. Proceedings; Popescu-Belis, A., Stiefelhagen, R., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008; Vol. 5237; ISBN 9783540858522.

A chapter in an edited book

Ehrenfeucht, A.; Rozenberg, G. A Formal Framework for Bioprocesses in Living Cells. In Unconventional Computation: 10th International Conference, UC 2011, Turku, Finland, June 6-10, 2011. Proceedings; Calude, C.S., Kari, J., Petre, I., Rozenberg, G., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011; pp. 10–10 ISBN 9783642213403.

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 Biology.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J. SpaceX Just Nailed Its Fifth Landing After Another Successful Launch Available online: https://www.iflscience.com/space/spacex-just-nailed-its-fifth-landing/ (accessed on 30 October 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 Pell Grants: How the Department of Education Estimates Program Costs; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1990;

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Seevaratnam, N. Forecasting Optimality in Resource Utilization for Cloud Computing Systems to Maximize Quality of Service. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University: Washington, DC, 2019.

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

Montague, J. A Rare Desert Bloom. New York Times 2017, B9.

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 title	Biology
Abbreviation	Biology (Basel)
ISSN (online)	2079-7737
Scope