How to format your references using the Genome Biology and Evolution citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Genome Biology and Evolution. 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	Download the output style file
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

Turner DL. 2014. Space science: Near-Earth space shows its stripes. Nature. 507:308–309.

A journal article with 2 authors

Lee SK, Ahn CW. 2014. Probing of 2 dimensional confinement-induced structural transitions in amorphous oxide thin film. Sci. Rep. 4:4200.

A journal article with 3 authors

Trainor PA, Ariza-McNaughton L, Krumlauf R. 2002. Role of the isthmus and FGFs in resolving the paradox of neural crest plasticity and prepatterning. Science. 295:1288–1291.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Birnbaum KM et al. 2005. Photon blockade in an optical cavity with one trapped atom. Nature. 436:87–90.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Wahbi M. 2013. Algorithms and Ordering Heuristics for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ USA.

An edited book

Ladikas M, Chaturvedi S, Zhao Y, Stemerding D, eds. 2015. Science and Technology Governance and Ethics: A Global Perspective from Europe, India and China. Springer International Publishing: Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Zhang J, Chen H, Wang H. 2014. Velocity Evaluation in Traffic Accidents Occurred at the Road Intersection Based on Image Processing. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology: CSAIT 2013, September 21–23, 2013, Kunming, China. Patnaik, S & Li, X, editors. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing Springer India: New Delhi pp. 39–44.

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 Genome Biology and Evolution.

Blog post

Luntz S. 2016. Three Giant Exoplanets Found In Twin Star System. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/three-giant-exoplanets-found-in-twin-star-system/ (Accessed October 30, 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. Telecommunications: FCC Should Assess the Design of the E-rate Program’s Internal Control Structure. 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

Gu J. 2010. Measurement, modeling, and synthesis of time-varying appearance of natural phenomena. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University: New York, NY.

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

Shear MD. 2017. Trump to Release Kennedy Killing Papers. New York Times, October 21.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Turner 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Turner 2014; Lee & Ahn 2014).

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

Two authors: (Lee & Ahn 2014)
Three or more authors: (Birnbaum et al. 2005)

About the journal

Full journal title	Genome Biology and Evolution
Abbreviation	Genome Biol. Evol.
ISSN (online)	1759-6653
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Genetics