How to format your references using the Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology. 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

[1]

Chesebro B. Biomedicine. A fresh look at BSE. Science 2004;305:1918–21.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Schwartz D, Collins F. Medicine. Environmental biology and human disease. Science 2007;316:695–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Yu F, Ma J, Han S. Adsorption of tetracycline from aqueous solutions onto multi-walled carbon nanotubes with different oxygen contents. Sci Rep 2014;4:5326.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Kasowski M, Grubert F, Heffelfinger C, Hariharan M, Asabere A, Waszak SM, et al. Variation in transcription factor binding among humans. Science 2010;328:232–5.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Cooper JD. Soil Water Measurement. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2016.

An edited book

[1]

Dawson C, Gerritsen M, editors. Computational Challenges in the Geosciences. vol. 156. New York, NY: Springer; 2013.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Li X-G, Niculescu S-I, Çela A. Invariance Property: A Unique Idea for Complete Stability Analysis. In: Niculescu S-I, Cela A, editors. Analytic Curve Frequency-Sweeping Stability Tests for Systems with Commensurate Delays, Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015, p. 47–52.

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 Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology.

Blog post

[1]

Fang J. Even Death Doesn’t Stop Geckos From Sticking To The Walls. IFLScience 2014. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/death-will-not-stop-geckos-sticking-walls/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office. ADP Budget: SSA’s Fiscal Year 1990 Information Technology Systems Budget Request. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1989.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Chun AR. Physiological, Ultrastructure, and Preliminary Genomic Characterization of the Marine Protist Thraustochytrium sp. LLF1b (class Labyrinthulomycetes). Doctoral dissertation. University of California San Diego, 2017.

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

[1]

Milhollin G, Motz K. Why Iraq Will Defeat Arms Inspectors. New York Times 2002:A17.

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	Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology
Abbreviation	Synth. Syst. Biotechnol.
ISSN (print)	2405-805X
Scope