How to format your references using the The Journal of Biological Chemistry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). 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

Honour, J. W. (2004) The fight for fair play. Nature. 430, 143–144

A journal article with 2 authors

Mishima, O., and Suzuki, Y. (2002) Propagation of the polyamorphic transition of ice and the liquid-liquid critical point. Nature. 419, 599–603

A journal article with 3 authors

Desai, T. J., Brownfield, D. G., and Krasnow, M. A. (2014) Alveolar progenitor and stem cells in lung development, renewal and cancer. Nature. 507, 190–194

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kawahara, A., Nishi, T., Hisano, Y., Fukui, H., Yamaguchi, A., and Mochizuki, N. (2009) The sphingolipid transporter spns2 functions in migration of zebrafish myocardial precursors. Science. 323, 524–527

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Smed, J., and Hakonen, H. (2017) Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Andréka, H., Ferenczi, M., and Németi, I. (eds.) (2013) Cylindric-like Algebras and Algebraic Logic, Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Desnica, V., Živanov, L., Aleksić, O., Luković, M., and Lukić, L. (2005) The Design of Optimised Planar Thick Film Filters. in Computer Engineering in Applied Electromagnetism (Wiak, S., Krawczyk, A., and Trlep, M. eds), pp. 31–34, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

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 Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Blog post

Taub, B. (2016) Amazon Completes First Drone Delivery In Just 13 Minutes. IFLScience. [online] https://www.iflscience.com/technology/amazon-completes-first-drone-delivery-just-13-minutes/ (Accessed October 30, 2018)

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 (1978) Relevance of GAO Report, “Improvements Needed in DOE’s Efforts To Develop a Financial Reporting System,” 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

Baciu, A. B. (2010) Biopolitics and the influenza pandemics of 1918 and 2009 in the United States: Power, immunity, and the law. Doctoral dissertation thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC

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

Hollander, S. (2000) Kaukenas’s Magical Night Means Romp for Seton Hall. New York Times

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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 Journal of Biological Chemistry
Abbreviation	J. Biol. Chem.
ISSN (print)	0021-9258
ISSN (online)	1083-351X
Scope	Biochemistry Cell Biology Molecular Biology