How to format your references using the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological 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	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

Hoskins BJ (2003) Atmospheric science. Climate change at cruising altitude? Science 301:469–470

A journal article with 2 authors

Prawer S, Greentree AD (2008) Applied physics. Diamond for quantum computing. Science 320:1601–1602

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang J, Sheng L, Liu J (2014) Synthetically chemical-electrical mechanism for controlling large scale reversible deformation of liquid metal objects. Sci Rep 4:7116

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Cardinale BJ, Srivastava DS, Duffy JE, et al (2006) Effects of biodiversity on the functioning of trophic groups and ecosystems. Nature 443:989–992

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

O’Connor K, Aardema F, Pélissier M-C (2006) Beyond Reasonable Doubt. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Shamir A, Korat O (2013) Technology as a Support for Literacy Achievements for Children at Risk. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Chen Z, Lu M (2016) Economic Opening and Domestic Market Integration. In: Lu M (ed) Toward Balanced Growth with Economic Agglomeration: Empirical Studies of China’s Urban-Rural and Interregional Development. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 89–109

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 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological Sciences.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) New Research Shows How To Trap Cancer By Turning Your Body Against The Tumour. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-research-shows-how-trap-cancer-turning-your-body-against-tumour/. 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 (1988) Defaulted Student Loans: Preliminary Analysis of Student Loan Borrowers and Defaulters. 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

Childers JW (2017) Evaluating parental opinions of healthy snack guidelines for youth soccer. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Crow K (2000) The Student, the Sleuth and the Mysterious Pillow. New York Times 141

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	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological Sciences
Abbreviation	Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. India Sect. B Biol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0369-8211
ISSN (online)	2250-1746
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Environmental Science