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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Biotechnology. 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

Elmegreen, B., 2014. Astrophysics: How tiny galaxies form stars. Nature 514, 310–311.

A journal article with 2 authors

Du, J.-L., Poo, M.-M., 2004. Rapid BDNF-induced retrograde synaptic modification in a developing retinotectal system. Nature 429, 878–883.

A journal article with 3 authors

Behie, S.W., Zelisko, P.M., Bidochka, M.J., 2012. Endophytic insect-parasitic fungi translocate nitrogen directly from insects to plants. Science 336, 1576–1577.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Clark, J.M., Xu, X., Forster, C.A., Wang, Y., 2004. A Middle Jurassic “sphenosuchian” from China and the origin of the crocodylian skull. Nature 430, 1021–1024.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Brown, R.A., 2012. Extreme Tissue Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Li, S., 2012. Advances in Soft Matter Mechanics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Staab, S., Scherp, A., Arndt, R., Troncy, R., Grzegorzek, M., Saathoff, C., Schenk, S., Hardman, L., 2008. Semantic Multimedia, in: Baroglio, C., Bonatti, P.A., Małuszyński, J., Marchiori, M., Polleres, A., Schaffert, S. (Eds.), Reasoning Web: 4th International Summer School 2008, Venice, Italy, September 7-11, 2008, Tutorial Lectures, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 125–170.

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 Biotechnology.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Researchers Identify New Possible Supernova Trigger [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/researchers-identify-new-possible-supernova-trigger/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1992. Federal Research: Assessment of the Financial Audit for SEMATECH’s Activities in 1991 (No. RCED-93-50). 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

Bradford, A., 2015. Internationalization Policy at the Genba: Exploring the Implementation of Social Science English-Taught Undergraduate Degree Programs in Three Japanese Universities (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Walsh, M.W., 2015. Puerto Rico Fails to Pay $58 Million Bond Debt. New York Times B1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Elmegreen, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Du and Poo, 2004; Elmegreen, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Du and Poo, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Clark et al., 2004)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Biotechnology
Abbreviation	J. Biotechnol.
ISSN (print)	0168-1656
Scope	Biotechnology Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology General Medicine