How to format your references using the Biology Open citation style

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

Hoegh-Guldberg, O. (2006). Ecology. Complexities of coral reef recovery. Science 311, 42–43.

A journal article with 2 authors

Crombie, A. T. and Murrell, J. C. (2014). Trace-gas metabolic versatility of the facultative methanotroph Methylocella silvestris. Nature 510, 148–151.

A journal article with 3 authors

Birbeck, G. L., Meyer, A.-C. and Ogunniyi, A. (2015). Nervous system disorders across the life course in resource-limited settings. Nature 527, S167-71.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Isles, A. R., Baum, M. J., Ma, D., Keverne, E. B. and Allen, N. D. (2001). Urinary odour preferences in mice. Nature 409, 783–784.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Silverstein, D., Samuel, P. and Decarlo, N. (2008). The Innovator’s Toolkit. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Butenko, S., Gil-Lafuente, J. and Pardalos, P. M. eds. (2010). Optimal Strategies in Sports Economics and Management. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Husmann, M., Nebeling, M. and Norrie, M. C. (2013). MultiMasher: A Visual Tool for Multi-device Mashups. In Current Trends in Web Engineering: ICWE 2013 International Workshops ComposableWeb, QWE, MDWE, DMSSW, EMotions, CSE, SSN, and PhD Symposium, Aalborg, Denmark, July 8-12, 2013. Revised Selected Papers (ed. Sheng, Q. Z.) and Kjeldskov, J.), pp. 27–38. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Open.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2013). More evidence for the possibility of ancient life on Mars. 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 (2017). Information Technology: Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Needs to Strengthen Its Strategic Planning and Oversight to Modernize Legacy Systems. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Fay, C. (2017). Aposematic Variation and the Evolution of Warning Coloration in Mammals.

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

Brantley, B. (2017). There’s Lust in Her Heart, for Language. New York Times C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hoegh-Guldberg, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Crombie and Murrell, 2014; Hoegh-Guldberg, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Crombie and Murrell, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Isles et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biology Open
Abbreviation	Biol. Open
ISSN (online)	2046-6390
Scope