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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Sigl, G., 2001. Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays: physics and astrophysics at extreme energies. Science 291, 73–79.
A journal article with 2 authors
Chisholm, J.R., Kelley, R., 2001. Worms start the reef-building process. Nature 409, 152.
A journal article with 3 authors
Timm, R.M., Ramey, R.R., 2nd, Nomenclature Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists, 2005. What constitutes a proper description? Science 309, 2163–6; author reply 2163-6.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Kerns, J.G., Cohen, J.D., MacDonald, A.W., 3rd, Cho, R.Y., Stenger, V.A., Carter, C.S., 2004. Anterior cingulate conflict monitoring and adjustments in control. Science 303, 1023–1026.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Baldwin, C.J., 2015. The 10 Principles of Food Industry Sustainability. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.
An edited book
Hostettler, S., Gadgil, A., Hazboun, E. (Eds.), 2015. Sustainable Access to Energy in the Global South: Essential Technologies and Implementation Approaches. Springer International Publishing, Cham.
A chapter in an edited book
Shih, C.-Y., Capitán, J., Marrón, P.J., Viguria, A., Alarcón, F., Schwarzbach, M., Laiacker, M., Kondak, K., Martínez-de Dios, J.R., Ollero, A., 2014. On the Cooperation between Mobile Robots and Wireless Sensor Networks, in: Koubaa, A., Khelil, A. (Eds.), Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks 2014, Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 67–86.

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
O`Callaghan, J., 2017. SpaceX Wants To Start Launching Its Space Internet Satellites In 2019 [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/spacex-wants-to-start-launching-its-space-internet-satellites-in-2019/ (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. Advance Sheets: Volume 73, Decisions of the Comptroller General of the United States (No. OGC-94-28). 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
Brady, D.C., 2008. The transforming Rho family GTPase, Wrch -1, regulates epithelial cell morphogenesis through modulating cell junctions and actin cytoskeletal dynamics (Doctoral dissertation). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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
Knopper, S., 2017. American Phoenix. New York Times TR1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sigl, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Chisholm and Kelley, 2001; Sigl, 2001).

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

  • Two authors: (Chisholm and Kelley, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Kerns et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal titleBiotechnology Advances
AbbreviationBiotechnol. Adv.
ISSN (print)0734-9750
ScopeBiotechnology

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