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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Systems and Synthetic 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	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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Fields S (2007) Molecular biology. Site-seeing by sequencing. Science 316:1441–1442

A journal article with 2 authors

Bengtson MH, Joazeiro CAP (2010) Role of a ribosome-associated E3 ubiquitin ligase in protein quality control. Nature 467:470–473

A journal article with 3 authors

Runyon JB, Mescher MC, De Moraes CM (2006) Volatile chemical cues guide host location and host selection by parasitic plants. Science 313:1964–1967

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhang J, Wang C, Yu S, et al (2014) Sevoflurane postconditioning protects rat hearts against ischemia-reperfusion injury via the activation of PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling. Sci Rep 4:7317

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Charalambides CA (2016) Discrete q-Distributions. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Singh H (2016) Plasma-based Radar Cross Section Reduction, 1st ed. 2016. Springer, Singapore

A chapter in an edited book

Tornyai R, Kertesz A (2014) Towards Autonomous Data Sharing Across Personal Clouds. In: Lopes L, Žilinskas J, Costan A, et al. (eds) Euro-Par 2014: Parallel Processing Workshops: Euro-Par 2014 International Workshops, Porto, Portugal, August 25-26, 2014, Revised Selected Papers, Part II. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 50–61

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 Systems and Synthetic Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) WATCH: Live HD streaming Of Earth From The International Space Station. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (2005) GAO Update on the Number of Prekindergarten Care and Education Programs. 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

Mednick Takami L (2017) Chief Diversity Officers in U.S. Higher Education: Impacting the Campus Climate for Diversity. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Walsh MW (2011) A Proposal for Drawing a Clearer Picture of Public Pension Finances. New York Times B6

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Fields 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Fields 2007; Bengtson and Joazeiro 2010).

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

Two authors: (Bengtson and Joazeiro 2010)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Systems and Synthetic Biology
Abbreviation	Syst. Synth. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1872-5325
ISSN (online)	1872-5333
Scope	Biotechnology Molecular Biology Bioengineering