How to format your references using the BioSystems citation style

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

Kane, T.J., 2003. Education. The long road to race-blindness. Science 302, 571–573.

A journal article with 2 authors

Jinek, M., Doudna, J.A., 2009. A three-dimensional view of the molecular machinery of RNA interference. Nature 457, 405–412.

A journal article with 3 authors

Shaviv, N.J., Prokoph, A., Veizer, J., 2014. Is the solar system’s galactic motion imprinted in the Phanerozoic climate? Sci. Rep. 4, 6150.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Zhou, P.Y., Dou, X.M., Wu, X.F., Ding, K., Li, M.F., Ni, H.Q., Niu, Z.C., Jiang, D.S., Sun, B.Q., 2014. Single-photon property characterization of 1.3 μm emissions from InAs/GaAs quantum dots using silicon avalanche photodiodes. Sci. Rep. 4, 3633.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cox, C., 2014. An Introduction to LTE. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Attanasio, M., Capursi, V. (Eds.), 2011. Statistical Methods for the Evaluation of University Systems, Contributions to Statistics. Physica-Verlag HD, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Gavrilovska, L., Denkovski, D., Rakovic, V., Angjelicinoski, M., 2015. Medium Access Control Protocols in Cognitive Radio Networks, in: Di Benedetto, M.-G., Cattoni, A.F., Fiorina, J., Bader, F., De Nardis, L. (Eds.), Cognitive Radio and Networking for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks: Recent Advances and Visions for the Future, Signals and Communication Technology. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 109–149.

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 BioSystems.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. Study Of More Than 3,500 Human Brains Reveals The Cause Of Alzheimer’s Disease [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/brain/study-suggests-tau-not-amyloid-major-driver-alzheimers/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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. The Impact of Federal Commodity Donations on the School Lunch Program (No. CED-77-32). 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

Florio, M.L., 2012. Assessing the impacts of knowing natural team player styles on team satisfaction and cohesion (Doctoral dissertation). Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

Beard, M., 2017. Wrath in the Time of Choler. New York Times BR18.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kane, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Jinek and Doudna, 2009; Kane, 2003).

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

Two authors: (Jinek and Doudna, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Zhou et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	BioSystems
Abbreviation	Biosystems.
ISSN (print)	0303-2647
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Applied Mathematics Modelling and Simulation Statistics and Probability General Medicine