How to format your references using the The Journal of General Physiology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Journal of General Physiology. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Grützmacher, H. 2000. CHEMISTRY: New Chemical Bricks Made Through Phosphorus Tricks. Science. 289:737–738.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kovács, A.M., and J. Mehler. 2009. Flexible learning of multiple speech structures in bilingual infants. Science. 325:611–612.

A journal article with 3 authors

Van Gaal, L.F., I.L. Mertens, and C.E. De Block. 2006. Mechanisms linking obesity with cardiovascular disease. Nature. 444:875–880.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Fan, Z., Y. Sun, Di Chen, D. Tay, W. Chen, C.X. Deng, and J. Fu. 2013. Acoustic tweezing cytometry for live-cell subcellular modulation of intracellular cytoskeleton contractility. Sci. Rep. 3:2176.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Shaw, M.T. 2011. Introduction to Polymer Rheology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Teodorescu, H.-N., A. Kirschenbaum, S. Cojocaru, and C. Bruderlein eds. . 2014. Improving Disaster Resilience and Mitigation - IT Means and Tools. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. XVI, 344 p. 110 illus pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Taillandier, F., and P. Taillandier. 2014. Risk Management in Construction Project Using Agent-Based Simulation. In Highlights of Practical Applications of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems. The PAAMS Collection: PAAMS 2014 International Workshops, Salamanca, Spain, June 4-6, 2014. Proceedings. J.M. Corchado, J. Bajo, J. Kozlak, P. Pawlewski, J.M. Molina, B. Gaudou, V. Julian, R. Unland, F. Lopes, K. Hallenborg, and P. García Teodoro, editors. Springer International Publishing, Cham. 34–43.

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 General Physiology.

Blog post

Andrews, R. 2017. A Completely New Human Organ Has Just Been Officially Discovered. 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. 2007. Air Traffic Control: FAA Reports Progress in System Acquisitions, but Changes in Performance Measurement Could Improve Usefulness of Information. 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

Sewell, A. 2013. A typology of sampling in hip-hop. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

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

Brantley, B. 2017. Serving Ham on Soignée Silk. New York Times. C1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Grützmacher, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Grützmacher, 2000; Kovács and Mehler, 2009).

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

Two authors: (Kovács and Mehler, 2009)
Three or more authors: (Fan et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	The Journal of General Physiology
Abbreviation	J. Gen. Physiol.
ISSN (print)	0022-1295
ISSN (online)	1540-7748
Scope	Physiology