How to format your references using the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Bulletin of Mathematical 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

Bascompte J (2009) Disentangling the web of life. Science 325:416–419

A journal article with 2 authors

Verchère A, Menon AK (2015) Structural biology: Lipid gymnastics. Nature 524:420–422

A journal article with 3 authors

Melchor RN, De Valais S, Genise JF (2002) Bird-like fossil footprints from the Late Triassic. Nature 417:936–938

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Yen H-CS, Xu Q, Chou DM, et al (2008) Global protein stability profiling in mammalian cells. Science 322:918–923

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wood P (2013) Western Art and the Wider World. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford

An edited book

Wu Z, Chen C, Guo M, Bu J (eds) (2005) Embedded Software and Systems: First International Conference, ICESS 2004, Hangzhou, China, December 9-10, 2004, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Tveito A, Langtangen HP, Nielsen BF, Cai X (2010) The Method of Least Squares. In: Langtangen HP, Nielsen BF, Cai X (eds) Elements of Scientific Computing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 147–193

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 Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Strangest Genitals In The Animal Kingdom. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/strangest-genitals-animal-kingdom/. 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 (2010) Statewide Transportation Planning: Surveys of State Departments of Transportation and Regional Planning and Development Organizations (GAO-11-78SP, December 2010), an E-supplement to GAO-11-77. 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

Beck RE (2012) Examining the relationship between self-initiated expatriation and cross-cultural adjustment among expatriate spouses within nonprofit organizations: A quantitative causal-comparative study. Doctoral dissertation, Capella 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

Baker P (2017) Leaving Stress As More Waits In Trip Abroad. 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 (Bascompte 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Bascompte 2009; Verchère and Menon 2015).

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

Two authors: (Verchère and Menon 2015)
Three or more authors: (Yen et al. 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
Abbreviation	Bull. Math. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0092-8240
ISSN (online)	1522-9602
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Computational Theory and Mathematics General Environmental Science Immunology General Mathematics General Neuroscience Pharmacology