How to format your references using the BMC Systems Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for BMC Systems Biology. 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. Brock SL. Materials science. Filling a void. Science. 2007;317:460–1.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. van’t Veer LJ, Bernards R. Enabling personalized cancer medicine through analysis of gene-expression patterns. Nature. 2008;452:564–70.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Smith MA, Brandt J, Shadmehr R. Motor disorder in Huntington’s disease begins as a dysfunction in error feedback control. Nature. 2000;403:544–9.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Cadena CD, Ricklefs RE, Jiménez I, Bermingham E. Ecology: is speciation driven by species diversity? Nature. 2005;438:E1-2; discussion E2.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Glaser R. Symmetry, Spectroscopy, and Crystallography. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA; 2015.

An edited book

1. Barahona P, Bry F, Franconi E, Henze N, Sattler U, editors. Reasoning Web: Second International Summer School 2006, Lisbon, Portugal, September 4-8, 2006, Tutorial Lectures. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Sobhani-Tehrani E, Khorasani K. Proposed FDII for Nonlinear Systems with Partial State Measurement. In: Khorasani K, editor. Fault Diagnosis of Nonlinear Systems Using a Hybrid Approach. Boston, MA: Springer US; 2009. p. 71–97.

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 BMC Systems Biology.

Blog post

1. Fang J. Spider Masquerades As Bird Poo. IFLScience. 2014. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/spider-masquerades-bird-poo/. 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

1. Government Accountability Office. Aviation Security: Significant Management Challenges May Adversely Affect Implementation of the Transportation Security Administration’s Secure Flight Program. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 2006.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Bernstein JP. Helical Symmetry. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach; 2010.

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. Saslow L. Increase in Heroin Use Leads to Proposed Laws. New York Times. 2008;:LI6.

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	BMC Systems Biology
Abbreviation	BMC Syst. Biol.
ISSN (online)	1752-0509
Scope	Molecular Biology Structural Biology Computer Science Applications Applied Mathematics Modelling and Simulation