How to format your references using the Journal of Mathematical Biology citation style

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

Ottino JM (2004) Engineering complex systems. Nature 427:399

A journal article with 2 authors

MacMillan T, Benton TG (2014) Agriculture: Engage farmers in research. Nature 509:25–27

A journal article with 3 authors

Turk MJ, Abel T, O’Shea B (2009) The formation of Population III binaries from cosmological initial conditions. Science 325:601–605

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Kamat S, Su X, Ballarini R, Heuer AH (2000) Structural basis for the fracture toughness of the shell of the conch Strombus gigas. Nature 405:1036–1040

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Phillips JJ, Phillips P, Pulliam A (2014) Measuring ROI in Environment, Health, and Safety. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Huang W, Alem L, Livingston MA (eds) (2013) Human Factors in Augmented Reality Environments. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Sternberg RJ (2014) A Model for Instruction and Assessment of Cognitive Readiness. In: O’Neil HF, Perez RS, Baker EL (eds) Teaching and Measuring Cognitive Readiness. Springer US, Boston, MA, pp 71–92

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 Mathematical Biology.

Blog post

Carpineti A (2016) This Might Be The Slowest Pulsar We’ve Ever Found. In: IFLScience. 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) Ocean Mining Technology Transfer (Best available copy). 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

Ackerman GL (2009) Information technology in the K–12 classroom: Curriculum and instruction reflecting emerging capacity and paradigms. Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral 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

Williams J (2017) The Head Honcho’s Head Honcho. New York Times BR4

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ottino 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Ottino 2004; MacMillan and Benton 2014).

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

Two authors: (MacMillan and Benton 2014)
Three or more authors: (Kamat et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Mathematical Biology
Abbreviation	J. Math. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0303-6812
ISSN (online)	1432-1416
Scope	Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) Applied Mathematics Modelling and Simulation