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

Smaglik P (2003) The glory of autonomy. Nature 422:353

A journal article with 2 authors

McFarland EW, Tang J (2003) A photovoltaic device structure based on internal electron emission. Nature 421:616–618

A journal article with 3 authors

Winkler W, Nahvi A, Breaker RR (2002) Thiamine derivatives bind messenger RNAs directly to regulate bacterial gene expression. Nature 419:952–956

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Lodowski DT, Pitcher JA, Capel WD, et al (2003) Keeping G proteins at bay: a complex between G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2 and Gbetagamma. Science 300:1256–1262

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Arden JB, Linford L (2008) Brain-Based Therapy with Adults. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Kaushik BK (2015) Carbon Nanotube Based VLSI Interconnects: Analysis and Design. Springer India, New Delhi

A chapter in an edited book

Li X, Shannon D, Ghosh I, et al (2008) Context-Sensitive Relevancy Analysis for Efficient Symbolic Execution. In: Ramalingam G (ed) Programming Languages and Systems: 6th Asian Symposium, APLAS 2008, Bangalore, India, December 9-11, 2008. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 36–52

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

Luntz S (2017) Vaccinated Tasmanian Devils Experience Cancer Remission. In: IFLScience. 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 (1996) Commuter Rail Service in Wisconsin and Illinois. 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

Waldner BW (2013) Determining Relationships Between Technology Acceptance and Employee Attitudes Toward Automated Workflows in the Oil Industry. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral 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

Flegenheimer M (2017) On Trump’s Right Flank, a Survivor Well Attuned to Resentment. New York Times A1

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik 2003).
This sentence cites two references (McFarland and Tang 2003; Smaglik 2003).

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

Two authors: (McFarland and Tang 2003)
Three or more authors: (Lodowski et al. 2003)

About the journal

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