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

Aspinall W. 2010 A route to more tractable expert advice. Nature 463, 294–295.

A journal article with 2 authors

Mahowald MW, Schenck CH. 2005 Insights from studying human sleep disorders. Nature 437, 1279–1285.

A journal article with 3 authors

Knapp S, Polaszek A, Watson M. 2007 Spreading the word. Nature 446, 261–262.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Stuart SN, Chanson JS, Cox NA, Young BE, Rodrigues ASL, Fischman DL, Waller RW. 2004 Status and trends of amphibian declines and extinctions worldwide. Science 306, 1783–1786.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bragg SM. 2011 The Controller’s Function. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Monfort V, Krempels K-H, Majchrzak TA, Turk Ž, editors. 2016 Web Information Systems and Technologies: 11th International Conference, WEBIST 2015, Lisbon, Portugal, May 20–22, 2015, Revised Selected Papers. 1st ed. 2016. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Anderson DG. 2016 Pedicle-Lengthening Osteotomy for the Treatment of Lumbar Spinal Stenosis. In Spinal Canal Stenosis (ed L Manfrè), pp. 75–85. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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

O`Callaghan J. 2015 Mass Extinctions May Actually Speed Up Evolution. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/environment/mass-extinctions-may-actually-speed-evolution/ (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. 1988 Aviation Safety: Measuring How Safely Individual Airlines Operate.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Soma VM. 2016 A particle filter methodology for salient object detection in videos. 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

Feeney K. 2007 Filipino Fast Food to Linger Over. New York Times, 18 March. , NJ6.

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