How to format your references using the Life Sciences citation style

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

P. Smaglik, Biotech’s balancing act, Nature. 423 (2003) 363.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

P. Coles, L.Y. Chiang, Characterizing the nonlinear growth of large-scale structure in the Universe, Nature. 406 (2000) 376–378.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

R.C. Grandison, M.D.W. Piper, L. Partridge, Amino-acid imbalance explains extension of lifespan by dietary restriction in Drosophila, Nature. 462 (2009) 1061–1064.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

H.C. Jenkyns, A. Forster, S. Schouten, J.S. Sinninghe Damsté, High temperatures in the Late Cretaceous Arctic Ocean, Nature. 432 (2004) 888–892.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G. Hauser, Hygienegerechte Apparate Und Anlagen, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, D-69451 Weinheim, Germany, 2008.

An edited book

[1]

B. Andrews, The Ricci Flow in Riemannian Geometry: A Complete Proof of the Differentiable 1/4-Pinching Sphere Theorem, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

D. Bresch, B. Desjardins, E. Grenier, Oscillatory Limits with Changing Eigenvalues: A Formal Study, in: A.V. Fursikov, G.P. Galdi, V.V. Pukhnachev (Eds.), New Directions in Mathematical Fluid Mechanics: The Alexander V. Kazhikhov Memorial Volume, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2010: pp. 91–104.

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 Life Sciences.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, According To Science, Are Male Or Female Orgasms Better?, IFLScience. (2016).

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, [Comments on Applicability of Grant-Back Provision of General Education Provisions Act to Library Services and Construction Act Programs], U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1987.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

A. Dhokar, LabVIEW based simulation and animation for the vibration control of active mass damper, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2015.

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]

M. Smith, J. Fortin, Kansas Governor to Be Nominated as Ambassador, New York Times. (2017) A16.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

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	Life Sciences
Abbreviation	Life Sci.
ISSN (print)	0024-3205
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology General Medicine General Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics