How to format your references using the Biotechnology Reports citation style

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

[1]

R.J. Davis, Chemistry. All that glitters is not Au0, Science. 301 (2003) 926–927.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

A. Chenn, C.A. Walsh, Regulation of cerebral cortical size by control of cell cycle exit in neural precursors, Science. 297 (2002) 365–369.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Y.T. Didenko, W.B. McNamara 3rd, K.S. Suslick, Molecular emission from single-bubble sonoluminescence, Nature. 407 (2000) 877–879.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

H. Ling, F. Boudsocq, B.S. Plosky, R. Woodgate, W. Yang, Replication of a cis-syn thymine dimer at atomic resolution, Nature. 424 (2003) 1083–1087.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D. Hopkins, Reading Paradise Lost, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

L.C. Hart, A.S. Alston, A. Murata, eds., Lesson Study Research and Practice in Mathematics Education: Learning Together, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Rudolph-Cleff, Urban Interplay, in: F. Wang, M. Prominski (Eds.), Urbanization and Locality: Strengthening Identity and Sustainability by Site-Specific Planning and Design, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016: pp. 75–94.

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 Reports.

Blog post

[1]

J. O`Callaghan, No, An Asteroid Isn’t Going To Hit Earth And Kill Us All Any Time Soon, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/space/no-asteroid-isnt-going-hit-earth-and-kill-us-all-any-time-soon/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Use of Computers by Firms Providing Architect-Engineer Services to Federal Agencies, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1980.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.Y. Rawashdeh, A Relational Framework for Clustering and Cluster Validity and the Generalization of the Silhouette Measure, Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2013.

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

[1]

G. Vecsey, Left on the Sideline as an Underdog Celebrates, New York Times. (2011) D7.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Biotechnology Reports
Abbreviation	Biotechnol. Rep. (Amst.)
ISSN (print)	2215-017X
Scope

Research and Writing Guides