How to format your references using the Biophysics Reports citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biophysics Reports. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

van den Heuvel EPJ (2008) Astronomy. An eccentric pulsar: result of a threesome? Science 320:1298–1299

A journal article with 2 authors

Allsop DJ, West SA (2003) Life history: changing sex at the same relative body size. Nature 425:783–784

A journal article with 3 authors

Migliari S, Fender R, Méndez M (2002) Iron emission lines from extended x-ray jets in SS 433: reheating of atomic nuclei. Science 297:1673–1676

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Chen H, Wang Y, Wang Q, et al (2014) Bifunctional organic polymeric catalysts with a tunable acid-base distance and framework flexibility. Sci Rep 4:6475

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kharmanda G, El Hami A (2016) Reliability in Biomechanics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Mizuno K, Takano M (eds) (2015) Coronary Angioscopy. Springer Japan, Tokyo

A chapter in an edited book

Carlevale E (2011) Creating Community Web Sites with Organic Groups. In: Luisi J, Négyesi K, Anderson G, et al. (eds) The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7. Apress, Berkeley, CA, pp 109–124

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 Biophysics Reports.

Blog post

Luntz S (2014) Houdini Honey Badgers Can Escape From Anywhere. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/houdini-honey-badgers-can-escape-anywhere/. 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 (1989) Special Education: Congressional Action Needed to Improve Chapter 1 Handicapped Program. 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

Collins JD (2012) Answers in diagenesis: Assessing mussel shell diagenesis in the modern vadose zone at Lyon’s Bluff (22OK520), northeast Mississippi. Doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State 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

Billard M (2010) Dress Like a Benefactor. New York Times E5

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (van den Heuvel 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Allsop and West 2003; van den Heuvel 2008).

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

Two authors: (Allsop and West 2003)
Three or more authors: (Chen et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biophysics Reports
Abbreviation	Biophys. Rep.
ISSN (print)	2364-3439
ISSN (online)	2364-3420
Scope