How to format your references using the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 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

Check E. 2002 Biodefence: ploughshares into swords. Nature 420, 736.

A journal article with 2 authors

Knapp AK, Smith MD. 2001 Variation among biomes in temporal dynamics of aboveground primary production. Science 291, 481–484.

A journal article with 3 authors

Hwang H-W, Wentzel EA, Mendell JT. 2007 A hexanucleotide element directs microRNA nuclear import. Science 315, 97–100.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Suh GSB, Wong AM, Hergarden AC, Wang JW, Simon AF, Benzer S, Axel R, Anderson DJ. 2004 A single population of olfactory sensory neurons mediates an innate avoidance behaviour in Drosophila. Nature 431, 854–859.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

May V, Kühn O. 2007 Charge and Energy Transfer Dynamics in Molecular Systems. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH.

An edited book

Mahnken AH, Wilhelm KE, Ricke J, editors. 2013 CT- and MR-Guided Interventions in Radiology. 2nd ed. 2013. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Takanashi K, Mizukami S. 2013 Spintronic Properties and Advanced Materials. In Optical Properties of Advanced Materials (eds Y Aoyagi, K Kajikawa), pp. 103–124. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

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 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2014 Researchers Discover How Pac-Man Frogs Are Able To Hunt Large Prey. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-how-pac-man-frogs-are-able-hunt-large-prey/ (accessed on 30 October 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. 1999 Year 2000 Computing Challenge: Important Progress Made, But Much Work Remains to Avoid Disruption of Critical Services.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Dean DO. 2012 A discrete-time multiple event process survival mixture (MEPSUM) model for investigating the order and timing of multiple non-repeatable events. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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

Wasik JF. 2017 How Student Debt Is Snuffing Out Creative Sparks. New York Times, 11 January. , B7.

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	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Abbreviation	Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0962-8436
ISSN (online)	1471-2970
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology