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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Protein 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Marte B (2013) Tumour heterogeneity. Nature 501:327

A journal article with 2 authors

Yeeles JTP, Marians KJ (2011) The Escherichia coli replisome is inherently DNA damage tolerant. Science 334:235–238

A journal article with 3 authors

Shiono M, Matsugaki N, Takeda K (2005) Phytochemistry: structure of the blue cornflower pigment. Nature 436:791

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Turnbaugh PJ, Ley RE, Mahowald MA, et al (2006) An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest. Nature 444:1027–1031

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Stacey D (2008) Aeronautical Radio Communication Systems and Networks. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

García-Prada JC, Castejón C (2014) New Trends in Educational Activity in the Field of Mechanism and Machine Theory. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Trezzi J-P, Vlassis N, Hiller K (2015) The Role of Metabolomics in the Study of Cancer Biomarkers and in the Development of Diagnostic Tools. In: Scatena R (ed) Advances in Cancer Biomarkers: From biochemistry to clinic for a critical revision. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 41–57

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 Protein Journal.

Blog post

Andrew E (2016) We’ve Created A New Way To Look At Your Vagina – It Might Just Save Your Life. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/we-ve-created-new-way-look-your-vagina-it-might-just-save-your-life/. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1995) Department of Transportation: Issues Related to Transportation Funding. 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

Escamilla D (2012) How performance following the implementation of a new structure affects employee engagement. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University

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

Shpigel B (2017) The Rally Before the Rally. New York Times B9

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 Protein Journal
Abbreviation	J. Protein Chem.
ISSN (print)	1572-3887
ISSN (online)	1573-4943
Scope	Biochemistry Bioengineering Analytical Chemistry Organic Chemistry