How to format your references using the Genetics citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Sapolsky R. M., 2011 Behavior. Sympathy for the CEO. Science 333: 293–294.
A journal article with 2 authors
Mahowald M. W., and C. H. Schenck, 2005 Insights from studying human sleep disorders. Nature 437: 1279–1285.
A journal article with 3 authors
Wang P.-Y., J. Weng, and R. G. W. Anderson, 2005 OSBP is a cholesterol-regulated scaffolding protein in control of ERK 1/2 activation. Science 307: 1472–1476.
A journal article with 6 or more authors
Quervain D. J.-F. de, U. Fischbacher, V. Treyer, M. Schellhammer, U. Schnyder, et al., 2004 The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science 305: 1254–1258.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Pick J. B., 2012 Geo-Business GIS in the Digital Organization. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Strate J., 2012 Expert Performance Indexing for SQL Server 2012(T. Krueger, Ed.). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
A chapter in an edited book
Kuhlmann M., and M. Gogolla, 2012 Strengthening SAT-Based Validation of UML/OCL Models by Representing Collections as Relations, pp. 32–48 in Modelling Foundations and Applications: 8th European Conference, ECMFA 2012, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, July 2-5, 2012. Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. edited by Vallecillo A., Tolvanen J.-P., Kindler E., Störrle H., Kolovos D. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Genetics.

Blog post
Andrew D., 2016 Antisocial Behaviour – It’s All In The Brain. IFLScience.

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, 2006 LOCAL Television Act: Status of Spending for Fiscal Year 2005. 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
Kharal S. P., 2017 Modelling Sensitization Dynamics in 5xxx Series Aluminum Alloys

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
Crow K., 2003 Read All About It, Every Day for 70 Years. New York Times 146.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Sapolsky 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Mahowald and Schenck 2005; Sapolsky 2011).

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

  • Two authors: (Mahowald and Schenck 2005)
  • Three or more authors: (de Quervain et al. 2004)

About the journal

Full journal titleGenetics
AbbreviationGenetics
ISSN (print)0016-6731
ISSN (online)1943-2631
ScopeGenetics

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