How to format your references using the IUBMB Life citation style

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

[1]

Graham-Rowe, D. (2011) Biodiversity: Endangered and in demand. Nature 480, S101-3.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Engwerda, C. R., and Good, M. F. (2012) Immunology. Platelets kill the parasite within. Science (New York, N.Y.) 338, 1304–1305.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Baksh, M. M., Jaros, M., and Groves, J. T. (2004) Detection of molecular interactions at membrane surfaces through colloid phase transitions. Nature 427, 139–141.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

[1]

Poliakoff, M., Fitzpatrick, J. M., Farren, T. R., and Anastas, P. T. (2002) Green chemistry: science and politics of change. Science (New York, N.Y.) 297, 807–810.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Hübschmann, H.-J. (2015) Handbook of GC-MS. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany.

An edited book

[1]

Waseda, Y. (2011) X-Ray Diffraction Crystallography: Introduction, Examples and Solved Problems. (Matsubara E, Shinoda K, eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Berube, D. M. (2009) Intuitive Toxicology: The Public Perception of Nanoscience. In Nanotechnology & Society: Current and Emerging Ethical Issues, (Allhoff F, Lin P, eds.). . pp. 91–108, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

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 IUBMB Life.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew, E. (2015) Can Elusive Cancer Stem Cells Seed New Tumours Months After Chemotherapy? 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office (1976) Selected Literature on Cost Accounting and Cost Control for Automatic Data Processing. 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

[1]

Tomko, P. R. (2012) Understanding the factors affecting the influence of children on their parents’ total purchases. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University.

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

[1]

Murphy, M. J. O. (2017) A Madcap Austen, Alfresco. New York Times, C1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	IUBMB Life
ISSN (print)	1521-6543
ISSN (online)	1521-6551
Scope