How to format your references using the Engineering in Life Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Engineering in Life Sciences. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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]

Schulz, M., Materials science. Speeding up artificial muscles. Science 2012, 338, 893–894.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Gold, J.I., Shadlen, M.N., Representation of a perceptual decision in developing oculomotor commands. Nature 2000, 404, 390–394.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Gilmore, C.K., McCarthy, S.E., Spelke, E.S., Symbolic arithmetic knowledge without instruction. Nature 2007, 447, 589–591.

A journal article with 5 or more authors

[1]

Zhang, S., Xie, C., Wang, Q., Liu, Z., Interactions of CaMKII with dopamine D2 receptors: roles in levodopa-induced dyskinesia in 6-hydroxydopamine lesioned Parkinson’s rats. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 6811.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Cheng, V.S., Tong, J.C., Building Sustainability in East Asia, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK 2017.

An edited book

[1]

Raulin, C., Karsai, S. (Eds.), Laser and IPL Technology in Dermatology and Aesthetic Medicine, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Rao, D., McNamee, P., Dredze, M., Entity Linking: Finding Extracted Entities in a Knowledge Base, in: Poibeau, T., Saggion, H., Piskorski, J., Yangarber, R. (Eds.), Multi-Source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2013, pp. 93–115.

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 Engineering in Life Sciences.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew, E., Experimental Drug Kills Malaria Parasite In 2 Days. IFLScience 2014.

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, Analysis of the Loan Interest Subsidy and Grant Methods of Financing Construction, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 1970.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Ports, M.O., Laterally associated proteins modulate α6 integrin cleavage, a permissive process utilized during cancer metastasis, Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, 2009.

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]

Walsh, M.W., House Bill on Puerto Rico Debt Near Completion. New York Times 2016, B2.

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	Engineering in Life Sciences
Abbreviation	Eng. Life Sci.
ISSN (print)	1618-0240
ISSN (online)	1618-2863
Scope	Biotechnology Bioengineering Environmental Engineering