How to format your references using the Biosemiotics citation style

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

Dalton, R. (2000). Los Alamos “loses” key weapons data. Nature, 405(6788), 725.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mederos, A., & Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. (2001). Converting currencies in the Old World. Nature, 411(6836), 437.

A journal article with 3 authors

Weng, L., Menczer, F., & Ahn, Y.-Y. (2013). Virality prediction and community structure in social networks. Scientific reports, 3, 2522.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Pan, C.-T., Hinks, J. A., Ramasse, Q. M., Greaves, G., Bangert, U., Donnelly, S. E., & Haigh, S. J. (2014). In-situ observation and atomic resolution imaging of the ion irradiation induced amorphisation of graphene. Scientific reports, 4, 6334.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Golding, P. (2005). Next Generation Wireless Applications. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Abbas, S. (2015). Advanced Functional Evolution Equations and Inclusions. (M. Benchohra, Ed.) (Vol. 39). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Deutsch, H. (2014). Microscopes and Endoscopes. In F. Phillips, I. Lieberman, & D. Polly (Eds.), Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery: Surgical Techniques and Disease Management (pp. 37–41). New York, NY: 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 Biosemiotics.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2016, June 30). Why Should Mammal Dads Care? IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-care/. Accessed 30 October 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. (1997). Status of Information Needed to Complete Financial Audit of the District of Columbia’s Dedicated Highway Fund for Fiscal Year 1996 (No. AIMD-97-73R). 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

Garyan, D. (2017). Converging origins: Never forget what happened in the future (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Walsh, M. W. (2016, October 15). Puerto Rico Said to Face ‘Death Spiral’ Over Debt. New York Times, p. B3.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dalton 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Dalton 2000; Mederos and Lamberg-Karlovsky 2001).

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

Two authors: (Mederos and Lamberg-Karlovsky 2001)
Three or more authors: (Pan et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biosemiotics
Abbreviation	Biosemiotics
ISSN (print)	1875-1342
ISSN (online)	1875-1350
Scope	Language and Linguistics Social Sciences (miscellaneous) Communication