How to format your references using the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. 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

Goldston, D., 2007. Technical advice. Nature 448, 119.

A journal article with 2 authors

Donaldson, Z.R., Young, L.J., 2008. Oxytocin, vasopressin, and the neurogenetics of sociality. Science 322, 900–904.

A journal article with 3 authors

Royden, L.H., Burchfiel, B.C., van der Hilst, R.D., 2008. The geological evolution of the Tibetan Plateau. Science 321, 1054–1058.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Viola, L., Fortunato, E.M., Pravia, M.A., Knill, E., Laflamme, R., Cory, D.G., 2001. Experimental realization of noiseless subsystems for quantum information processing. Science 293, 2059–2063.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chin, E., Nel, D., Ólafsson, S., 2014. Problems and Solutions in Mathematical Finance. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Gómez Fernández, J.F., 2012. Maintenance Management in Network Utilities: Framework and Practical Implementation, Springer Series in Reliability Engineering. Springer, London.

A chapter in an edited book

Besson, F., Blazy, S., Wilke, P., 2015. A Concrete Memory Model for CompCert, in: Urban, C., Zhang, X. (Eds.), Interactive Theorem Proving: 6th International Conference, ITP 2015, Nanjing, China, August 24-27, 2015, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 67–83.

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 Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.

Blog post

Taub, B., 2016. Mars Astronauts May Suffer Dementia Due To Cosmic Radiation [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1997. Urban Transportation: Challenges to Widespread Deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems (No. RCED-97-74). 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

Ladendorff, M.Z., 2014. The effect of North American Electric Reliability Corporation critical infrastructure protection standards on bulk electric system reliability (Doctoral dissertation). Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

Vecsey, G., 2011. Appetite for Racing, And for Winning. New York Times D4.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Goldston, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Donaldson and Young, 2008; Goldston, 2007).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Donaldson and Young, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Viola et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
Abbreviation	Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0079-6107
Scope	Biophysics Molecular Biology

Research and Writing Guides