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

Zuber, M. T. (2001). The crust and mantle of Mars. Nature 412, 220–227.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hanahan, D. and Weinberg, R. A. (2008). Retrospective: Judah Folkman (1933-2008). Science 319, 1055.

A journal article with 3 authors

Innocenti, P., Morrow, E. H. and Dowling, D. K. (2011). Experimental evidence supports a sex-specific selective sieve in mitochondrial genome evolution. Science 332, 845–848.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Skrott, Z., Mistrik, M., Andersen, K. K., Friis, S., Majera, D., Gursky, J., Ozdian, T., Bartkova, J., Turi, Z., Moudry, P., et al. (2017). Alcohol-abuse drug disulfiram targets cancer via p97 segregase adaptor NPL4. Nature 552, 194–199.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pandya, R. (2005). Mobile and Personal Communication Services and Systems. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Marinello, F., Passeri, D. and Savio, E. eds. (2013). Acoustic Scanning Probe Microscopy. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Rintaluoma, T., Reinikka, T., Rouvinen, J., Boutellier, J., Jääskeläinen, P. and Silvén, O. (2009). Programmable Accelerators for Reconfigurable Video Decoder. In Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation: 9th International Workshop, SAMOS 2009, Samos, Greece, July 20-23, 2009. Proceedings (ed. Bertels, K.), Dimopoulos, N.), Silvano, C.), and Wong, S.), pp. 36–47. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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

Carpineti, A. (2016). Hubble Snaps Stunning New Views Of Jupiter’s Auroras. 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 (1987). Attack Warning: ADP and Communication Modernization Programs for Warning and Assessment. 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

Viramontes, M. (2009). Parenting styles and practices and their impact on school behavior.

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

Kelly, M. (2001). Politically Charged Graffiti Treats Spears as a Symptom, Not a Star. New York Times 148.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zuber, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Hanahan and Weinberg, 2008; Zuber, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Hanahan and Weinberg, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Skrott et al., 2017)

About the journal

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