How to format your references using the Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational 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 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

Macilwain C (2000) NSF puts big money into complex ecology. Nature 407:823

A journal article with 2 authors

Nishimura M, Somerville S (2002) Plant biology. Resisting attack. Science 295:2032–2033

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen Z, Yang H, Pavletich NP (2008) Mechanism of homologous recombination from the RecA-ssDNA/dsDNA structures. Nature 453:489–484

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Grützner F, Rens W, Tsend-Ayush E, et al (2004) In the platypus a meiotic chain of ten sex chromosomes shares genes with the bird Z and mammal X chromosomes. Nature 432:913–917

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Fraser J, Simkins BJ (2009) Enterprise Risk Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Rippe JM (2014) Fructose, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sucrose and Health. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Shashi Kumar MS, Avinash N (2013) Real-Time Stereo Camera Calibration Using Stereo Synchronization and Erroneous Input Image Pair Elimination. In: Swamy PP, Guru DS (eds) Multimedia Processing, Communication and Computing Applications: Proceedings of the First International Conference, ICMCCA, 13-15 December 2012. Springer India, New Delhi, pp 51–61

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 Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) Salt Used To De-Ice Roads Can Make Frogs Change Sex. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/salt-used-to-deice-roads-can-make-frogs-change-sex/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1982) Improper Use of Federal Student Aid Funds for Lobbying Activities. 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

Mehta K (2015) An optimized modified booth recoder for efficient design of the add-multiply operator. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Grynbaum MM, Steel E (2017) Fox News Fires Another Host, as Tough Headlines Keep the Staff Reeling. New York Times B1

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	Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences
Abbreviation	Interdiscip. Sci.
ISSN (print)	1913-2751
ISSN (online)	1867-1462
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Computer Science Applications Health Informatics