How to format your references using the Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. 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

Hoagland M (2004) Enter transfer RNA. Nature 431:249

A journal article with 2 authors

Farley KA, Mukhopadhyay S (2001) An extraterrestrial impact at the Permian-Triassic boundary? Science 293:2343

A journal article with 3 authors

Panda S, Hogenesch JB, Kay SA (2002) Circadian rhythms from flies to human. Nature 417:329–335

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Cooper A, Lalueza-Fox C, Anderson S, et al (2001) Complete mitochondrial genome sequences of two extinct moas clarify ratite evolution. Nature 409:704–707

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Thiessen H (1996) Measuring the Real World. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., West Sussex, England

An edited book

Dekhtyar Y, Katashev A, Lancere L (eds) (2013) International Symposium on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, 10-12 October, 2012, Riga, Latvia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Griffin P, Cagasan L, Care E, et al (2016) Formative Assessment Policy and Its Enactment in the Philippines. In: Laveault D, Allal L (eds) Assessment for Learning: Meeting the Challenge of Implementation. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 75–92

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 Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) This Is How Much Data The Internet Gets Through In One Minute. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-is-how-much-data-the-internet-gets-through-in-one-minute/. 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 (1981) Legislative and Regulatory Actions Needed To Deal With a Changing Domestic Telecommunications Industry. 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

Pan X (2008) Using Structural Information in Modeling and Multiple Alignments for Phylogenetics. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State 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

Stewart JB (2017) New Chief Portrays A Kinder, Gentler Uber. 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 (Hoagland 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Farley and Mukhopadhyay 2001; Hoagland 2004).

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

Two authors: (Farley and Mukhopadhyay 2001)
Three or more authors: (Cooper et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres
Abbreviation	Orig. Life Evol. Biosph.
ISSN (print)	0169-6149
ISSN (online)	1573-0875
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Space and Planetary Science General Medicine