How to format your references using the Biotechnology Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Biotechnology Letters. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Payne DJ (2008) Microbiology. Desperately seeking new antibiotics. Science 321:1644–1645

A journal article with 2 authors

Smith ZR, Long JA (2010) Control of Arabidopsis apical-basal embryo polarity by antagonistic transcription factors. Nature 464:423–426

A journal article with 3 authors

Luo ZX, Crompton AW, Sun AL (2001) A new mammaliaform from the early Jurassic and evolution of mammalian characteristics. Science 292:1535–1540

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Leinders-Zufall T, Lane AP, Puche AC, et al (2000) Ultrasensitive pheromone detection by mammalian vomeronasal neurons. Nature 405:792–796

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bielecki TR, Brigo D, Patras F (2011) Credit Risk Frontiers. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Croitoru M, Rudolph S, Wilson N, et al (eds) (2012) Graph Structures for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Second International Workshop, GKR 2011, Barcelona, Spain, July 16, 2011. Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

May N, Weber I (2008) Information Gathering for Semantic Service Discovery and Composition in Business Process Modeling. In: Dietz JLG, Albani A, Barjis J (eds) Advances in Enterprise Engineering I: 4th International Workshop CIAO! and 4th International Workshop EOMAS, held at CAiSE 2008, Montpellier, France, June 16-17, 2008. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 46–60

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 Letters.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) Man Drinks Five Energy Drinks A Day And Develops Hepatitis. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/man-drinks-five-energy-drinks-a-day-and-develops-hepatitis/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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) [Comments on DOD Data Center Consolidation Plan]. 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

Lee S (2005) The Influence of Product Involvement and Fan Identification on Response to Team Sponsors’ Products. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State 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

Kelly K, Stevenson A (2017) Doubt After Health Care Defeat Briefly Sends Stocks Tumbling. New York Times B1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Payne 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Payne 2008; Smith and Long 2010).

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

Two authors: (Smith and Long 2010)
Three or more authors: (Leinders-Zufall et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biotechnology Letters
Abbreviation	Biotechnol. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0141-5492
ISSN (online)	1573-6776
Scope	Biotechnology General Medicine