How to format your references using the BioTechniques citation style

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

Westervelt, R.M. 2008. Applied physics. Graphene nanoelectronics. Science 320:324–325.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fortágh, J., and C. Zimmermann. 2005. PHYSICS: Toward Atom Chips. Science 307:860–861.

A journal article with 3 authors

Soung, Y.H., K. Pruitt, and J. Chung. 2014. Epigenetic silencing of ARRDC3 expression in basal-like breast cancer cells. Sci. Rep. 4:3846.

A journal article with 10 or more authors

Hood, E., J. Fellman, R.G.M. Spencer, P.J. Hernes, R. Edwards, D. D’Amore, and D. Scott. 2009. Glaciers as a source of ancient and labile organic matter to the marine environment. Nature 462:1044–1047.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Balan, V., and M. Neagu. 2011. Jet Single-Time Lagrange Geometry and Its Applications (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

2009. The Hygiene Hypothesis and Darwinian Medicine (Basel: Birkhäuser).

A chapter in an edited book

Kalogeras, N., J.M.E. Pennings, G. van Dijk, and I.A. van der Lans. 2007. The Structure of Marketing Cooperatives. In Vertical Markets and Cooperative Hierarchies: The Role of Cooperatives in the Agri-Food Industry, J. Nilsson, ed. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands), pp. 73–92.

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 BioTechniques.

Blog post

Andrew, E. 2014. Four Fennec Foxes Born At The Living Desert Zoo (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. 2007. Drug Testing: Undercover Tests Reveal Significant Vulnerabilities in DOT’s Drug Testing Program (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

Mednick Takami, L. 2017. Chief Diversity Officers in U.S. Higher Education: Impacting the Campus Climate for Diversity. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach.

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

(nyt), S.K. 2003. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Putin Reaches Out To Vatican. New York Times A6.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (1).
This sentence cites two references (1, 2).
This sentence cites four references (1–4).

About the journal

Full journal title	BioTechniques
Abbreviation	Biotechniques
ISSN (print)	0736-6205
ISSN (online)	1940-9818
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Biotechnology

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