How to format your references using the IET Synthetic Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for IET Synthetic 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	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

Al-Gazali, L.: ‘Genome-sequencing anniversary. Human genome sequencing: celebrating 10 years’Science, 2011, 331, (6019), p. 873.

A journal article with 2 authors

Adam, D., Butler, D.: ‘Comet mission hangs in the balance’Nature, 2003, 421, (6919), p. 102.

A journal article with 3 authors

Roberts, J.M., Wheeler, A.J., Freiwald, A.: ‘Reefs of the deep: the biology and geology of cold-water coral ecosystems’Science, 2006, 312, (5773), pp. 543–547.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Coulter, D.A., Foley, R.J., Kilpatrick, C.D., et al.: ‘Swope Supernova Survey 2017a (SSS17a), the optical counterpart to a gravitational wave source’Science, 2017, 358, (6370), pp. 1556–1558.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Larrieu, N., Varet, A.: ‘Rapid Prototyping of Software for Avionics Systems’ (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014)

An edited book

Thorup, M. (Ed.): ‘Intellectual History of Economic Normativities’ (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016)

A chapter in an edited book

Krugman, S.D., Lane, W.G.: ‘Fatal Child Abuse’, in Korbin, J.E., Krugman, R.D. (Eds.): ‘Handbook of Child Maltreatment’ (Springer Netherlands, 2014), pp. 99–112

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 IET Synthetic Biology.

Blog post

Hale, T.: ‘Quadrantid Meteor Shower Will Light Up The Skies On Tuesday And Wednesday Night’, https://www.iflscience.com/space/quadrantid-meteor-shower-will-light-up-the-skies-on-tuesday-and-wednesday-night/, accessed October 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: ‘Test and Evaluation: DOD Has Been Slow In Improving Testing of Software-Intensive Systems’ (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Gimbel, S.I.: ‘Imaging frontal and medial temporal lobe interaction during memory retrieval and disentangling the effects of the default network’. Doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2010

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

Vecsey, G.: ‘Redemption Is in Burress’s Sizable Reach’New York Times, 2011, p. D3.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [2, 4].
This sentence cites four references [2, 4, 6, 8].

About the journal

Full journal title	IET Synthetic Biology
ISSN (print)	1752-1394
Scope	Biotechnology Cell Biology Molecular Biology Bioengineering