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

Karoly, D. J. 2003. Atmospheric science. Ozone and climate change. Science 302: 236–237.

A journal article with 2 authors

Darios, F. and B. Davletov. 2006. Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids stimulate cell membrane expansion by acting on syntaxin 3. Nature 440: 813–817.

A journal article with 3 authors

Schieber, J., D. Krinsley and L. Riciputi. 2000. Diagenetic origin of quartz silt in mudstones and implications for silica cycling. Nature 406: 981–985.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Yun, B.-W., A. Feechan, M. Yin, N. B. B. Saidi, T. Le Bihan, M. Yu, J. W. Moore, J.-G. Kang, E. Kwon, S. H. Spoel, et al. 2011. S-nitrosylation of NADPH oxidase regulates cell death in plant immunity. Nature 478: 264–268.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Levy, D. 2011. Practical Diabetes Care. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK.

An edited book

Srivastava, A. 2016. Functional and Shape Data Analysis (E. P. Klassen, ed). Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Bürgisser, P. and F. Cucker. 2013. Probabilistic Analysis of Rectangular Matrices. In: Condition: The Geometry of Numerical Algorithms (F. Cucker, ed), pp. 77–100. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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

Carpineti, A. 2017. New Hypothesis Shows How Supermassive Black Holes Formed. 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. 1993. Highway Demonstration Projects. 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

Wyers, M. L. 2015. An Investigation of Teacher Understanding and Perceptions of the Effectiveness of the Use of Learning Targets in the Classroom. Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO.

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

Lanchester, J. 2016. What the West Can Learn From Japan About the Cultural Value of Work.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Karoly, 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Karoly, 2003; Darios and Davletov, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Darios and Davletov, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Yun et al., 2011)

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