How to format your references using the Journal of Biosciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Biosciences (JBSC). 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

Parak F 2011 Nature 478 325

A journal article with 2 authors

Quental TB and Marshall CR 2013 Science 341 290–2

A journal article with 3 authors

Lemos B, Araripe LO, and Hartl DL 2008 Science 319 91–3

A journal article with 9 or more authors

Reganold JP, Glover JD, Andrews PK, and Hinman HR 2001 Nature 410 926–30

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Carver RH and Tai K-C 2005 Modern Multithreading (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

Spaccapietra S and Delcambre L (Eds) 2009 Journal on Data Semantics XIV (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

Berdine J 2009 Automatic Verification of Heap Manipulation Using Separation Logic; in: SOFSEM 2009: Theory and Practice of Computer Science: 35th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, Špindlerův Mlýn, Czech Republic, January 24-30, 2009. Proceedings (eds) M Nielsen, A Kučera, PB Miltersen, C Palamidessi, P Tůma, and F Valencia (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 34–34

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 Journal of Biosciences.

Blog post

Fang J 2015 New Croc-like Carnivore Preceded Dinosaurs https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/new-croc-carnivore-preceded-dinosaurs/. Viewed 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 1991 Airline Competition: Pending Legislation Helps to Address Serious Competitive Problems (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hernandez A 2012 Impact of the Child and Family Services Improvement Act of 2006 on monthly caseworker visits to children in Los Angeles County on California’s foster care system, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

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

Greenhouse L 2005 New York Times A25

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Parak 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Parak 2011; Quental and Marshall 2013).

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

Two authors: (Quental and Marshall 2013)
Three or more authors: (Reganold et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Biosciences
ISSN (print)	0250-5991
ISSN (online)	0973-7138
Scope