How to format your references using the The FEBS Journal citation style

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

1 Wagner A (2002) Retrospective. Willibald Jentschke (1911-2002). Science 296, 672.

A journal article with 2 authors

1 Keefer DK & Larsen MC (2007) Geology. Assessing landslide hazards. Science 316, 1136–1138.

A journal article with 3 authors

1 Knigge C, Leigh N & Sills A (2009) A binary origin for “blue stragglers” in globular clusters. Nature 457, 288–290.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

1 te Welscher P, Zuniga A, Kuijper S, Drenth T, Goedemans HJ, Meijlink F & Zeller R (2002) Progression of vertebrate limb development through SHH-mediated counteraction of GLI3. Science 298, 827–830.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1 DiGrado BD & Thorp GA (2007) The Aboveground Steel Storage Tank Handbook John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

1 Wieser G & Tausz M (eds.) (2007) Trees at their Upper Limit: Treelife Limitation at the Alpine Timberline Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

1 McTear M, Callejas Z & Griol D (2016) Conversational Interfaces: Past and Present. In The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices (Callejas Z & Griol D, eds), pp. 51–72. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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 FEBS Journal.

Blog post

1 Davis J (2016) Scientists Claim To Have Reversed Menopause. 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

1 Government Accountability Office (2011) Electronic Government: National Archives and Records Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 Expenditure Plan 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

1 Deshotel MW (2017) Enhancing Undergraduate Water Resources Engineering Education Using Data and Modeling Resources Situated in Real-world Ecosystems: Design Principles and Challenges for Scaling and Sustainability. .

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

1 Crow K (2001) Physically Unscathed, But Hardly Untouched. New York Times, 144.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	The FEBS Journal
Abbreviation	FEBS J.
ISSN (print)	1742-464X
ISSN (online)	1742-4658
Scope	Biochemistry Cell Biology Molecular Biology