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

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

Hunter-Schaedle, K., 2015. When science fails a scientist. Science 349, 1134.

A journal article with 2 authors

Li, D., Agha, L., 2015. Research funding. Big names or big ideas: do peer-review panels select the best science proposals? Science 348, 434–438.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aldaye, F.A., Palmer, A.L., Sleiman, H.F., 2008. Assembling materials with DNA as the guide. Science 321, 1795–1799.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Leanhardt, A.E., Pasquini, T.A., Saba, M., Schirotzek, A., Shin, Y., Kielpinski, D., Pritchard, D.E., Ketterle, W., 2003. Cooling Bose-Einstein condensates below 500 picokelvin. Science 301, 1513–1515.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gordon, A., Hernandez, S., 2016. The Official (ISC) 2® Guide to the SSCP 2® CBK 2®. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana.

An edited book

Liebenberg, E., Collier, P., Török, Z.G. (Eds.), 2014. History of Cartography: International Symposium of the ICA, 2012, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Bouhafs, F., Mackay, M., Merabti, M., 2014. Communication Solutions for Backhaul and Wide Area Networks, in: Mackay, M., Merabti, M. (Eds.), Communication Challenges and Solutions in the Smart Grid, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 37–51.

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: X.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. Photo from NASA’s New Horizon Shows a “Heart” on Pluto [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/latest-photo-nasas-new-horizon-shows-heart-pluto/ (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, 1990. B-2 Bomber: Initial Flight Tests (No. NSIAD-90-284). 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

Mande, M., 2017. Sisyphus’s Fault: How the Shifting Terrain of a Changing Institution Makes Curriculum Reform an “Impossible Task” (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

(nyt), S.K., 2005. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: U.S. Asylum For Blast Survivor. New York Times A6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Hunter-Schaedle, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Hunter-Schaedle, 2015; Li and Agha, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Li and Agha, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Leanhardt et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Biotechnology: X
ISSN (print)	2590-1559
Scope