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

Molnar, P. (2011). Jack oliver (1923-2011). Nature, 470(7333), 176.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hoorn, C., & Flantua, S. (2015). Geology. An early start for the Panama land bridge. Science (New York, N.Y.), 348(6231), 186–187.

A journal article with 3 authors

Seufert, V., Ramankutty, N., & Foley, J. A. (2012). Comparing the yields of organic and conventional agriculture. Nature, 485(7397), 229–232.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Bibby, T. S., Mary, I., Nield, J., Partensky, F., & Barber, J. (2003). Low-light-adapted Prochlorococcus species possess specific antennae for each photosystem. Nature, 424(6952), 1051–1054.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McGrath, A. E. (2011). Darwinism and the Divine. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Pochet, Y. (2006). Production Planning by Mixed Integer Programming. (L. A. Wolsey, Ed.). New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Bergel, A., & Bettini, L. (2013). Generic Programming in Pharo. In J. Cordeiro, S. Hammoudi, & M. van Sinderen (Eds.), Software and Data Technologies: 7th International Conference, ICSOFT 2012, Rome, Italy, July 24-27, 2012, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 66–79). 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 Biosemiotics.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014, October 10). Discovery Of “Good Fat” Molecules Could Lead To New Diabetes Treatment. IFLScience. IFLScience. 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. (1980). Update on Federal Matching and Maintenance of Effort Requirements for California (No. GGD-80-63). 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

Frias-Martinez, V. (2008). Behavior-based admission and access control for network security (Doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY.

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

Murphy, M. J. O. (2016, June 10). Friday File. New York Times, p. C25.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Molnar 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Hoorn and Flantua 2015; Molnar 2011).

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

Two authors: (Hoorn and Flantua 2015)
Three or more authors: (Bibby et al. 2003)

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