How to format your references using the Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Saudi Journal of 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

Check, E., 2003. National Academies launch grants for interdisciplinary work. Nature 422, 791.

A journal article with 2 authors

Yang, L., Huang, H.W., 2002. Observation of a membrane fusion intermediate structure. Science 297, 1877–1879.

A journal article with 3 authors

Dhakal, K., Black, B., Mohanty, S., 2014. Introduction of impermeable actin-staining molecules to mammalian cells by optoporation. Sci. Rep. 4, 6553.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Zhou, Y., Castonguay, P., Sidhom, E.-H., Clark, A.R., Dvela-Levitt, M., Kim, S., Sieber, J., Wieder, N., Jung, J.Y., Andreeva, S., Reichardt, J., Dubois, F., Hoffmann, S.C., Basgen, J.M., Montesinos, M.S., Weins, A., Johnson, A.C., Lander, E.S., Garrett, M.R., Hopkins, C.R., Greka, A., 2017. A small-molecule inhibitor of TRPC5 ion channels suppresses progressive kidney disease in animal models. Science 358, 1332–1336.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Vignes, A., 2013. Extractive Metallurgy 1. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Corradini, A., Ehrig, H., Montanari, U., Ribeiro, L., Rozenberg, G. (Eds.), 2006. Graph Transformations: Third International Conference, ICGT 2006 Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, September 17-23, 2006 Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Nenon, T., 2011. The Limits of Biomedical Ethics and the Specific Role of Phenomenology in Biomedical Ethics, in: Wiggins, O.P., Allen, A.C. (Eds.), Clinical Ethics and the Necessity of Stories: Essays in Honor of Richard M. Zaner, Philosophy and Medicine. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 45–55.

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 Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J., 2015. Black-Hole-Scope Could Reveal the Mystery of how Cosmic Jets Form [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/black-hole-scope-could-reveal-mystery-how-cosmic-jets-form/ (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, 1977. Improved Management of Computer Resources Needed To Enhance Marine Corps’ Efficiency and Effectiveness (No. LCD-76-124). 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

Cline, D., 2012. Criminal faces: Clinical experiences of forensic artists (Doctoral dissertation). Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, 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

Crow, K., 2003. A Bus Stop May Disappear, And Some Old Bones Groan. New York Times 145.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Check, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Check, 2003; Yang and Huang, 2002).

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

Two authors: (Yang and Huang, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Zhou et al., 2017)

About the journal

Full journal title	Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences
Abbreviation	Saudi J. Biol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	1319-562X
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences