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

Gosden, R. 2013. Robert Edwards (1925-2013). Nature 497: 318.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gibson, M. C. and N. Perrimon. 2005. Extrusion and death of DPP/BMP-compromised epithelial cells in the developing Drosophila wing. Science 307: 1785–1789.

A journal article with 3 authors

Truckses, D. M., L. S. Garrenton and J. Thorner. 2004. Jekyll and Hyde in the microbial world. Science 306: 1509–1511.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Gehring, G. M., A. Schweinsberg, C. Barsi, N. Kostinski and R. W. Boyd. 2006. Observation of backward pulse propagation through a medium with a negative group velocity. Science 312: 895–897.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gasser, W., E. Heiner and K. Elk. 2005. Greensche Funktionen in Festkörper- und Vielteilchenphysik. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG.

An edited book

Ebara, M. 2014. Smart Biomaterials (Y. Kotsuchibashi, R. Narain, N. Idota, Y.-J. Kim, J. M. Hoffman, K. Uto, and T. Aoyagi, eds). Springer Japan, Tokyo.

A chapter in an edited book

Valmari, A. and G. Franceschinis. 2010. Simple O(m logn) Time Markov Chain Lumping. In: Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems: 16th International Conference, TACAS 2010, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2010, Paphos, Cyprus, March 20-28, 2010. Proceedings (J. Esparza and R. Majumdar, eds), pp. 38–52. 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

Luntz, S. 2014. Cone Snail Pain Killers Could be 100 Times As Effective As Morphine. 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. NASA Property: Improving Management of Government Equipment Provided to Contractors. 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

Vu, M. K. 2015. Reducing mental health provider burnout through wellness: A grant proposal. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Lipton, E., B. Protess and A. W. Lehren. 2017. Blue-Red Split: From Capitol To 18th Green.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Gosden, 2013).
This sentence cites two references (Gibson and Perrimon, 2005; Gosden, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Gibson and Perrimon, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Gehring et al., 2006)

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

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