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

Marx, V. (2013). Biology: The big challenges of big data. Nature, 498(7453), 255–260.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wickens, M., & Kwak, J. E. (2008). Molecular biology. A tail tale for U. Science (New York, N.Y.), 319(5868), 1344–1345.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gratson, G. M., Xu, M., & Lewis, J. A. (2004). Microperiodic structures: direct writing of three-dimensional webs. Nature, 428(6981), 386.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Eisenhauer, N., Stefanski, A., Fisichelli, N. A., Rice, K., Rich, R., & Reich, P. B. (2014). Warming shifts “worming”: effects of experimental warming on invasive earthworms in northern North America. Scientific Reports, 4, 6890.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Inness, P., & Dorling, S. (2012). Operational Weather Forecasting. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Jackson, M., Nelson, D., & Stirk, S. (Eds.). (2005). Database: Enterprise, Skills and Innovation: 22nd British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 22, Sunderland, UK, July 5-7, 2005. Proceedings (Vol. 3567). Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Delahay, J. N., & Lauerman, W. C. (2011). Children’s Orthopedics. In S. W. Wiesel & J. N. Delahay (Eds.), Essentials of Orthopedic Surgery (pp. 173–251). 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

Andrew, E. (2015, August 5). Mindfulness-based Therapy Shown To Reduce PTSD Symptoms In Veterans. IFLScience; IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/mindfulness-based-therapy-shown-reduce-ptsd-symptoms-veterans/

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). Chicago Circulator (RCED-95-216R). 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

Park, J. K. (2012). Target Identification, Therapeutic Application and Maturation Mechanism of microRNAs [Doctoral dissertation]. 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

Crow, K. (2001, December 2). Small Budget Cuts at a School Cause a Large Amount of Pain. New York Times, 146.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Marx, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Marx, 2013; Wickens & Kwak, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Wickens & Kwak, 2008)
Three authors: (Gratson et al., 2004)
6 or more authors: (Eisenhauer et al., 2014)

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