How to format your references using the Biotechnology Advances citation style

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

Smith, C., 2005. Genomics: genotyping gets up to speed. Nature 435, 992.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dragoi, G., Tonegawa, S., 2011. Preplay of future place cell sequences by hippocampal cellular assemblies. Nature 469, 397–401.

A journal article with 3 authors

Gu, M., Kang, H., Li, X., 2014. Breaking the diffraction-limited resolution barrier in fiber-optical two-photon fluorescence endoscopy by an azimuthally-polarized beam. Sci. Rep. 4, 3627.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Pommier, A., Anaparthy, N., Memos, N., Kelley, Z.L., Gouronnec, A., Yan, R., Auffray, C., Albrengues, J., Egeblad, M., Iacobuzio-Donahue, C.A., Lyons, S.K., Fearon, D.T., 2018. Unresolved endoplasmic reticulum stress engenders immune-resistant, latent pancreatic cancer metastases. Science 360.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Blackford, R., 2012. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Seckbach, J. (Ed.), 2006. Life as We Know It. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Hosking, R.J., Dewar, R.L., 2016. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), in: Dewar, R.L. (Ed.), Fundamental Fluid Mechanics and Magnetohydrodynamics. Springer, Singapore, pp. 157–201.

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 Biotechnology Advances.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2013. Discovery of More Genes Associated With Alzheimer’s Disease [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/brain/discovery-more-genes-associated-alzheimer’s-disease/ (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, 1994. Education Finance: Extent of Federal Funding in State Education Agencies (No. HEHS-95-3). 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

Jalali Farahani, B., 2005. Adaptive Digital Calibration Techniques for High Speed, High Resolution Sigma Delta ADCs for Broadband Wireless Applications (Doctoral dissertation). Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

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

de la MERCED, M.J., 2017. Walmart to Acquire Bonobos for $310 Million. New York Times B4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smith, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2011; Smith, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Pommier et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biotechnology Advances
Abbreviation	Biotechnol. Adv.
ISSN (print)	0734-9750
Scope	Biotechnology