How to format your references using the Systematic Biology citation style

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

Blair H.T. 2014. Neuroscience. Charting the islands of memory. Science. 343:846–847.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tanno K.-I., Willcox G. 2006. How fast was wild wheat domesticated? Science. 311:1886.

A journal article with 3 authors

Chatterjee A., Mitrović M., Fortunato S. 2013. Universality in voting behavior: an empirical analysis. Sci. Rep. 3:1049.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kumar R., Kumari B., Srivastava A., Kumar M. 2014. NRfamPred: a proteome-scale two level method for prediction of nuclear receptor proteins and their sub-families. Sci. Rep. 4:6810.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Estopinal S.V., Lathrop W. 2011. Professional Surveyors and Real Property Descriptions. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Andersen M.L., Tufik S., editors. 2016. Rodent Model as Tools in Ethical Biomedical Research. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Magnier S. 2015. Suspensive Condition and Dynamic Epistemic Logic: A Leibnizian Survey. In: Armgardt M., Canivez P., Chassagnard-Pinet S., editors. Past and Present Interactions in Legal Reasoning and Logic. Cham: Springer International Publishing. p. 71–94.

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 Systematic Biology.

Blog post

Carpineti A. 2017. Kepler Could Soon Spot Extrasolar Moons. Available from https://www.iflscience.com/space/kepler-could-soon-spot-extrasolar-moons/.

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. 2007. Higher Education: Tuition Continues to Rise, but Patterns Vary by Institution Type, Enrollment, and Educational Expenditures. .

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

O’Connor C.S. 2015. Measurement of Dispersion and Attenuation in Granular Media using a Filter-Correlation Method. .

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

Oestreich J.R. 2017. Period Band Saves Empress. New York Times.:C2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Blair 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Tanno and Willcox 2006; Blair 2014).

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

Two authors: (Tanno and Willcox 2006)
Three or more authors: (Kumar et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Systematic Biology
Abbreviation	Syst. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1063-5157
ISSN (online)	1076-836X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Genetics