How to format your references using the Biosystems Engineering citation style

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

Egger, J. (2014). Refinement-cut: user-guided segmentation algorithm for translational science. Scientific Reports, 4, 5164.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ding, B., & Seeman, N. C. (2006). Operation of a DNA robot arm inserted into a 2D DNA crystalline substrate. Science (New York, N.Y.), 314(5805), 1583–1585.

A journal article with 3 authors

Nudleman, E., Wall, D., & Kaiser, D. (2005). Cell-to-cell transfer of bacterial outer membrane lipoproteins. Science (New York, N.Y.), 309(5731), 125–127.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Dueber, E. C., Schoeffler, A. J., Lingel, A., Elliott, J. M., Fedorova, A. V., Giannetti, A. M., Zobel, K., Maurer, B., Varfolomeev, E., Wu, P., Wallweber, H. J. A., Hymowitz, S. G., Deshayes, K., Vucic, D., & Fairbrother, W. J. (2011). Antagonists induce a conformational change in cIAP1 that promotes autoubiquitination. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6054), 376–380.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tibergien, M., & Pomering, R. (2011). Practice Made (More) Perfect. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Chen, Y., & Immorlica, N. (Eds.). (2013). Web and Internet Economics: 9th International Conference, WINE 2013, Cambridge, MA, USA, December 11-14, 2013, Proceedings (Vol. 8289). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Frey, H., Rührup, S., & Stojmenović, I. (2009). Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. In S. C. Misra, I. Woungang, & S. Misra (Eds.), Guide to Wireless Sensor Networks (pp. 81–111). 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 Biosystems Engineering.

Blog post

Evans, K. (2016, December 12). 22 Signs You Might Be A Narcissist. IFLScience; 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. (2000). Observations on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Fiscal Year 1999 Performance Report and Fiscal Year 2001 Performance Plan (NSIAD-00-192R). 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

French, D. C. (2012). A Case against E-Waste: Where One Country’s Trash is (Not) Another Country’s Treasure: Developing National E-Waste Legislation to Regulate E-Waste Exportation [Doctoral dissertation]. George Washington 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

Vecsey, G. (2010, December 26). Sports Take Him Away; Smells Bring Him Home. New York Times, SP9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Egger, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Ding & Seeman, 2006; Egger, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Ding & Seeman, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Dueber et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biosystems Engineering
Abbreviation	Biosyst. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1537-5110
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Animal Science and Zoology Food Science Soil Science Control and Systems Engineering