How to format your references using the The Biological Bulletin citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Biological Bulletin. 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

Smaglik, P. 2001. US structural genomics effort needs physicists for success. Nature 410: 723–724.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rushton, M. J. D. and A. Chroneos. 2014. Impact of uniaxial strain and doping on oxygen diffusion in CeO2. Sci. Rep. 4: 6068.

A journal article with 3 authors

Murray, B., W. T. Huntress Jr and L. D. Friedman. 2001. Mars outposts: a planetary society approach to exploration. Nature 412: 254–255.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Fleury, V., W. A. Watters, L. Allam and T. Devers. 2002. Rapid electroplating of insulators. Nature 416: 716–719.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Durenard, E. A. 2013. Professional Automated Trading. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Specht, L. and J. Yahalom (eds). 2011. Radiotherapy for Hodgkin Lymphoma. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Naimpally, A. and K. S. Rosselot. 2013. Hazardous Waste. In: Environmental Engineering: Review for the Professional Engineering Examination (K. S. Rosselot, ed), pp. 117–127. Springer US, Boston, MA.

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 The Biological Bulletin.

Blog post

Hale, T. 2016. Why Do Some People Have A Tiny Extra Hole In Their Ear? IFLScience.

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. 1984. Federal Agencies’ Actions To Implement Section 11 of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980. 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

Abdeljaber, S. R. 2015. High school mathematics teachers’ perceptions of mathematics education in northwest Florida. University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

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. 2001. A Shelter Gets a Cold Shoulder In a “Pastoral” Residential Area.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smaglik, 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Smaglik, 2001; Rushton and Chroneos, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Rushton and Chroneos, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Fleury et al., 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Biological Bulletin
Abbreviation	Biol. Bull.
ISSN (print)	0006-3185
ISSN (online)	1939-8697
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences