How to format your references using the Gene: X citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Gene: X. 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

Blow, N., 2009. Glycobiology: A spoonful of sugar. Nature 457, 617–620.

A journal article with 2 authors

Misra, S., Froelich, P.N., 2012. Lithium isotope history of Cenozoic seawater: changes in silicate weathering and reverse weathering. Science 335, 818–823.

A journal article with 3 authors

Houlié, N., Dreger, D., Kim, A., 2014. GPS source solution of the 2004 Parkfield earthquake. Sci. Rep. 4, 3646.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Sharma, S., Sarkar, S., Paul, S.S., Roy, S., Chattopadhyay, K., 2013. A small molecule chemical chaperone optimizes its unfolded state contraction and denaturant like properties. Sci. Rep. 3, 3525.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kissell, J., 2009. Mac® Security Bible. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.

An edited book

Mattassi, R., Loose, D.A., Vaghi, M. (Eds.), 2009. Hemangiomas and Vascular Malformations: An Atlas of Diagnosis and Treatment. Springer, Milano.

A chapter in an edited book

Moise, D., Carpen-Amarie, A., 2012. MapReduce Applications in the Cloud: A Cost Evaluation of Computation and Storage, in: Hameurlain, A., Hussain, F.K., Morvan, F., Tjoa, A.M. (Eds.), Data Management in Cloud, Grid and P2P Systems: 5th International Conference, Globe 2012, Vienna, Austria, September 5-6, 2012. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 37–48.

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 Gene: X.

Blog post

Hale, T., 2016. Scientists Finally Understand The 100-Year-Old Mystery Of This Sea Blob [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2003. College Completion: Additional Efforts Could Help Education with Its Completion Goals (No. GAO-03-568). 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

Smith, J.A., 2010. Functional analysis of ESAT-6 and EspB, two virulence proteins secreted by the ESX-1 system in Mycobacterium marinum (Doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Szirtes, G., 2016. Love and Violence. New York Times BR23.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Blow, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Blow, 2009; Misra and Froelich, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Misra and Froelich, 2012)
Three or more authors: (Sharma et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Gene: X
ISSN (print)	2590-1583
Scope