How to format your references using the BioSocieties citation style

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

Savage, N. (2015) Aerodynamics: Vortices and robobees. Nature 521(7552), S64-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Olson, P. & Hanahan, D. (2009) Cancer. Breaching the cancer fortress. Science (New York, N.Y.) 324(5933), 1400–1401.

A journal article with 3 authors

Franco, A., Malhotra, N. & Simonovits, G. (2014) Social science. Publication bias in the social sciences: unlocking the file drawer. Science (New York, N.Y.) 345(6203), 1502–1505.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Pravdo, S.H. et al. (2001) Discovery of X-rays from the protostellar outflow object HH2. Nature 413(6857), 708–711.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pandya, R. (2005) Mobile and Personal Communication Services and Systems, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Rotkin, S.V. & Subramoney, S. eds. (2005) Applied Physics of Carbon Nanotubes: Fundamentals of Theory, Optics and Transport Devices, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Weinberg, A.D. (2010) The Role of OX40 (CD134) in T-Cell Memory Generation. In: M. Zanetti & S. P. Schoenberger (eds.) Memory T Cells. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 57–68.

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 BioSocieties.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015) Ancient People Ate Porridge 32,000 Years Ago. IFLScience.

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 (1995) Amtrak: Information on Subsidies in Thruway Bus Operations, 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

Watts, K.S. (2008) The Effectiveness of a Social Story Intervention in Decreasing Disruptive Behavior in Autistic Children. Doctoral dissertation. Columbus, OH: Ohio 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

Kishkovsky, S. (2007) Purge Victims Remembered In Moscow Rite. New York Times, 30 October:p. A15.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Savage 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Savage 2015; Olson and Hanahan 2009).

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

Two authors: (Olson and Hanahan 2009)
Three or more authors: (Pravdo et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	BioSocieties
Abbreviation	Biosocieties
ISSN (print)	1745-8552
ISSN (online)	1745-8560
Scope	Health Policy Health(social science)

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