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

Smith B. 2012 Perspective: complexities of flavour. Nature 486, S6.

A journal article with 2 authors

Bethell T, Bergin E. 2009 Formation and survival of water vapor in the terrestrial planet-forming region. Science 326, 1675–1677.

A journal article with 3 authors

Petsch ST, Eglington TI, Edwards KJ. 2001 14C-dead living biomass: evidence for microbial assimilation of ancient organic carbon during shale weathering. Science 292, 1127–1131.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Baxter-Burrell A, Yang Z, Springer PS, Bailey-Serres J. 2002 RopGAP4-dependent Rop GTPase rheostat control of Arabidopsis oxygen deprivation tolerance. Science 296, 2026–2028.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vaccari DA, Strom PF, Alleman JE. 2005 Environmental Biology for Engineers and Scientists. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Liu C, Wang L, Yang A, editors. 2012 Information Computing and Applications: Third International Conference, ICICA 2012, Chengde, China, September 14-16, 2012. Proceedings, Part II. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Sillesen H. 2013 Vascular Hemodynamics. In Noninvasive Vascular Diagnosis: A Practical Guide to Therapy (eds AF AbuRahma, DF Bandyk), pp. 45–53. London: 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

Fang J. 2014 Rare Beaked Whale Washes Up in Australia. IFLScience.

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. 1995 Resources, Community, and Economic Development Information Systems Issue Area: Active Assignments.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Hoang V. 2009 Software maintenance: A program slicer using cross referencer. 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

Semple K, Chen DW. 2015 In Skelos Case, a Son Whose Life Seemed to Lose Traction Early. New York Times, 9 May. , A1.

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