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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Rochmyaningsih, D. (2015). Don’t distort policy in the name of national pride. Nature, 523(7560), 257.

A journal article with 2 authors

Georgescu, R. E., & O’Donnell, M. (2007). Structural biology. Getting DNA to unwind. Science (New York, N.Y.), 317(5842), 1181–1182.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bilham, R., Gaur, V. K., & Molnar, P. (2001). Earthquakes. Himalayan seismic hazard. Science (New York, N.Y.), 293(5534), 1442–1444.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Martin, J. D., Goettler, S. J., Fossé, N., & Iton, L. (2002). Designing intermediate-range order in amorphous materials. Nature, 419(6905), 381–384.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Relethford, J. H. (2017). 50 Great Myths of Human Evolution. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Stickler, B. A. (2016). Basic Concepts in Computational Physics (E. Schachinger, Ed.; 2nd ed. 2016). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Beaty, B., & Woo, B. (2016). Written by Alan Moore? In B. Woo (Ed.), The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (pp. 53–64). Palgrave Macmillan US.

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

Taub, B. (2016, September 21). New Study Reveals The History Of Cats’ Global Empire. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-study-reveals-history-cats-global-empire/

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. (1991). Airline Competition: Fares and Concentration at Small-City Airports (RCED-91-51). 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

Borchardt, G. M. (2013). Making D.C. Democracy’s Capital: Local Activism, the “Federal State”, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C [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

Gustines, G. G. (2011, October 13). Along the Heated Trail of the Man Who Created Muslim Superheroes. New York Times, C8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Rochmyaningsih, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Georgescu & O’Donnell, 2007; Rochmyaningsih, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Georgescu & O’Donnell, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Martin et al., 2002)

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