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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Proceedings 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

Squires JE. 2002 Artificial blood. Science 295, 1002–1005.

A journal article with 2 authors

Divakaruni AS, Murphy AN. 2012 Cell biology. A mitochondrial mystery, solved. Science 337, 41–43.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang G, Liu C, Fan S. 2013 Directly measuring of thermal pulse transfer in one-dimensional highly aligned carbon nanotubes. Sci. Rep. 3, 2549.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Sobolev AV, Hofmann AW, Brügmann G, Batanova VG, Kuzmin DV. 2008 A quantitative link between recycling and osmium isotopes. Science 321, 536.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bayuk JL, Healey J, Rohmeyer P, Sachs MH, Schmidt J, Weiss J. 2012 Cyber Security Policy Guidebook. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Chinesta F. 2014 PGD-Based Modeling of Materials, Structures and Processes. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Horn L-C. 2006 Pathogenesis of Histological Types of Endometrial Cancer. In Biology und Epidemiology of Hormone Replacement Therapy: Discussions on Post-Menopausal Health (eds MA Lewis, M Dietel, PC Scriba, WK Raff), pp. 55–62. 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 Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Blog post

Davis J. 2015 Researchers Discover How Bees Naturally ‘Vaccinate’ Their Young. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-how-bees-naturally-vaccinate-their-young/ (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. 1992 Biotechnology: Delays in and Status of EPA’s Efforts to Issue a TSCA Regulation.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Bowles A. 2012 The development of a standard of care for competency to stand trial evaluations. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, Malibu, 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

Qiu L. 2017 On Infrastructure, Claims That Don’t Quite Get Off the Ground. New York Times, 9 June. , A13.

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 Royal Society B
Abbreviation	Proc. Biol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0962-8452
ISSN (online)	1471-2954
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology General Environmental Science General Immunology and Microbiology General Medicine