How to format your references using the BioScience citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BioScience. 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	Download the output style file
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

Trenberth KE. 2015. CLIMATE CHANGE. Has there been a hiatus? Science (New York, N.Y.) 349: 691–692.

A journal article with 2 authors

Courseaux A, Nahon JL. 2001. Birth of two chimeric genes in the Hominidae lineage. Science (New York, N.Y.) 291: 1293–1297.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hopkins M, Harrison TM, Manning CE. 2008. Low heat flow inferred from >4 Gyr zircons suggests Hadean plate boundary interactions. Nature 456: 493–496.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Liu Z-Q, Song J-P, Liu X, Jiang J, Chen X, Yang L, Hu T, Zheng P-Y, Liu Z-G, Yang P-C. 2014. Mast cell-derived serine proteinase regulates T helper 2 polarization. Scientific reports 4: 4649.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Karamalidis AK, Dzombak DA. 2010. Surface Complexation Modeling. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

2016. Transmission Electron Microscopy: Diffraction, Imaging, and Spectrometry. Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Panda RK. 2015. Trend and Pattern of Crop Diversification in Odisha. Pages 59–67 in Ghosh M, Sarkar D, and Roy BC, eds. Diversification of Agriculture in Eastern India. Springer India.

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 BioScience.

Blog post

Hale T. 2016. This Robotic Arm Could Be Helping Out Amputees Very Soon. IFLScience. (30 October 2018; https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-robotic-arm-could-be-helping-out-amputees-very-soon/).

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. 1977. Centralized Subsystem for Paying Officers in the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service. U.S. Government Printing Office. Report no. FGMSD-77-23.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bradley KA. 2014. A Tennessee Irish Picnic: Foodways and Complex Community Dynamics. Doctoral dissertation. University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA.

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

Koblin J. 2017. For Revival, MTV Pivots To Its Past. New York Times B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Trenberth 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Courseaux and Nahon 2001, Trenberth 2015).

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

Two authors: (Courseaux and Nahon 2001)
Three or more authors: (Liu et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	BioScience
ISSN (print)	0006-3568
ISSN (online)	1525-3244
Scope