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 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

Westall, F. 2009. Geochemistry. Life on an anaerobic planet. Science. 323:471–472.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kirch, P.V., and W.D. Sharp. 2005. Coral 230Th dating of the imposition of a ritual control hierarchy in precontact Hawaii. Science. 307:102–104.

A journal article with 3 authors

Prokopenko, A.A., E.B. Karabanov, and D.F. Williams. 2002. Age of long sediment cores from Lake Baikal. Nature. 415:976.

A journal article with 99 or more authors

Rietze, R.L., H. Valcanis, G.F. Brooker, T. Thomas, A.K. Voss, and P.F. Bartlett. 2001. Purification of a pluripotent neural stem cell from the adult mouse brain. Nature. 412:736–739.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Iwacz, G., A. Jajszczyk, and M. Zajączkowski. 2008. Multimedia Broadcasting and Multicasting in Mobile Networks. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Whitacre, D.M. ed. . 2015. Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology Volume 235. 235. Springer International Publishing, Cham. XI, 175 p. 40 illus pp.

A chapter in an edited book

Bitter, M. 2011. Contradictions of the Commodity Carbon – On the Material and Symbolic Production of a Market. In After Cancún: Climate Governance or Climate Conflicts. E. Altvater and A. Brunnengräber, editors. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. 71–93.

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

Andrew, E. 2015. New Ebola Test can Rapidly Diagnose the Disease in Minutes. 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. Contract Award Practices: Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Generally Observes Competitive Principles. 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

Fregoso, J. 2015. Through the pipeline: Degree aspirations of African American and Latino males enrolled in California community colleges. 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

Vecsey, G. 2014. Staying on the Island, but Moving a World Away. New York Times. SP4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Westall, 2009).
This sentence cites two references (Westall, 2009; Kirch and Sharp, 2005).

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

Two authors: (Kirch and Sharp, 2005)
Three or more authors: (Rietze et al., 2001)

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