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

Petley, D.N., 2013. Geophysics. Characterizing giant landslides. Science 339, 1395–1396.

A journal article with 2 authors

Petcherski, A.G., Kimble, J., 2000. LAG-3 is a putative transcriptional activator in the C. elegans Notch pathway. Nature 405, 364–368.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sanders, T.A., Llagostera, E., Barna, M., 2013. Specialized filopodia direct long-range transport of SHH during vertebrate tissue patterning. Nature 497, 628–632.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wang, F., Li, P., Wang, D., Li, L., Xie, S., Liu, L., Wang, Y., Li, W.J., 2014. Mechanically modulated dewetting by atomic force microscope for micro- and nano- droplet array fabrication. Sci. Rep. 4, 6524.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chandrasekaran, S., 2016. Health, Safety, and Environmental Management in Offshore and Petroleum Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Hellborg, R., Whitlow, H.J., Zhang, Y. (Eds.), 2010. Ion Beams in Nanoscience and Technology, Particle Acceleration and Detection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Angluin, D., Aspnes, J., Eisenstat, D., 2007. A Simple Population Protocol for Fast Robust Approximate Majority, in: Pelc, A. (Ed.), Distributed Computing: 21st International Symposium, DISC 2007, Lemesos, Cyprus, September 24-26, 2007. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 20–32.

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

Carpineti, A., 2016. Martian Water Might Vary From Region To Region [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/martian-water-might-vary-from-region-to-region/ (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, 2013. NextGen Air Transportation System: FAA Has Made Some Progress in Midterm Implementation, but Ongoing Challenges Limit Expected Benefits (No. GAO-13-264). 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

Hoang, T.T., 2017. Acoustic and Image Vehicle Classification System (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Feeney, K., 2008. A Little Taste Of France. New York Times NJ9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Petley, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Petcherski and Kimble, 2000; Petley, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Petcherski and Kimble, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Wang et al., 2014)

About the journal

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