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

Mervis, J. 2007. The world of undergraduate education. Many voices, one message. Introduction to special issue. Science 317: 63.

A journal article with 2 authors

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

A journal article with 3 authors

Purdy, T. P., R. W. Peterson and C. A. Regal. 2013. Observation of radiation pressure shot noise on a macroscopic object. Science 339: 801–804.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Mecchia, M. A., G. Santos-Fernandez, N. N. Duss, S. C. Somoza, A. Boisson-Dernier, V. Gagliardini, A. Martínez-Bernardini, T. N. Fabrice, C. Ringli, J. P. Muschietti, et al. 2017. RALF4/19 peptides interact with LRX proteins to control pollen tube growth in Arabidopsis. Science 358: 1600–1603.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Chen, X., C. G. Parini, B. Collins, Y. Yao and M. Ur Rehman. 2012. Antennas for Global Navigation Satellite Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Laird, W. R. and S. Roux (eds). 2008. Mechanics and Natural Philosophy Before the Scientific Revolution. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Farnan, J. M. and V. M. Arora. 2014. Graduate Medical Education and Patient Safety. In: Patient Safety: A Case-Based Comprehensive Guide (A. Agrawal, ed), pp. 53–68. Springer, New York, NY.

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

Andrew, D. 2017. A Discovery About The Movement Of Tectonic Plates Will Have Scientists Rewriting Textbooks. 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. 1983. Cost Recovery Practices Inconsistent With Government Policy. 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

Calhoun, G. F. 2009. Limit theory for overfit models. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, 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

Kelly, C. 2008. Cortlandt to Offer Plan To Lower Fuel Oil Costs.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Mervis, 2007).
This sentence cites two references (Tanno and Willcox, 2006; Mervis, 2007).

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

Two authors: (Tanno and Willcox, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Mecchia et al., 2017)

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