How to format your references using the BioMetals citation style

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

Berthoud H-R (2013) Medicine. Why does gastric bypass surgery work? Science 341:351–352

A journal article with 2 authors

Soshnikova N, Duboule D (2009) Epigenetic temporal control of mouse Hox genes in vivo. Science 324:1320–1323

A journal article with 3 authors

Attardo A, Fitzgerald JE, Schnitzer MJ (2015) Impermanence of dendritic spines in live adult CA1 hippocampus. Nature 523:592–596

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Dubois M, Demé B, Gulik-Krzywicki T, et al (2001) Self-assembly of regular hollow icosahedra in salt-free catanionic solutions. Nature 411:672–675

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Edwards DW (2014) Risk Management in Trading. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Ghafar-Zadeh E (2010) CMOS Capacitive Sensors for Lab-on-Chip Applications: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Carlberg C, Molnár F (2014) Linking Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation. In: Molnár F (ed) Mechanisms of Gene Regulation. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 71–89

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 BioMetals.

Blog post

Andrews R (2017) Scientists Forced To Write Studies To Refute Scott Pruitt’s Climate Denial Bullshit. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/scientists-forced-write-studies-refute-scott-pruitts-climate-denial-bullshit/. 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 (1971) Opportunities To Improve the Redistribution of the Federal Government’s Excess Automatic Data Processing Equipment. 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

Krug KA (2009) Critical literacy in the face of a mandated curriculum: Can children read beyond the text? Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University

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 C (2014) Film Delves Into Lives of Strippers in Dallas. New York Times A27B

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Berthoud 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Soshnikova and Duboule 2009; Berthoud 2013).

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

Two authors: (Soshnikova and Duboule 2009)
Three or more authors: (Dubois et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	BioMetals
Abbreviation	Biometals
ISSN (print)	0966-0844
ISSN (online)	1572-8773
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Biomaterials Metals and Alloys

Research and Writing Guides