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

Kotov NA (2010) Chemistry. Inorganic nanoparticles as protein mimics. Science 330:188–189

A journal article with 2 authors

Liu L, Stegman DR (2012) Origin of Columbia River flood basalt controlled by propagating rupture of the Farallon slab. Nature 482:386–389

A journal article with 3 authors

Zenisek D, Steyer JA, Almers W (2000) Transport, capture and exocytosis of single synaptic vesicles at active zones. Nature 406:849–854

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Li S-J, Hua Z-S, Huang L-N, et al (2014) Microbial communities evolve faster in extreme environments. Sci Rep 4:6205

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gao J (2010) Optoelectronic Integrated Circuit Design and Device Modeling. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Romijn J, Smith G, Pol J van de (2005) Integrated Formal Methods: 5th International Conference, IFM 2005, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 29 - December 2, 2005. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Takahashi K, Suzuki K, Ogata T, et al (2015) Efficient Motor Babbling Using Variance Predictions from a Recurrent Neural Network. In: Arik S, Huang T, Lai WK, Liu Q (eds) Neural Information Processing: 22nd International Conference, ICONIP 2015, Istanbul, Turkey, November 9-12, 2015, Proceedings Part III. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 26–33

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 (2014) Two-Headed Dolphin Washes Up On Turkish Beach. In: IFLScience. 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 (1982) Information Resource Management Problems in the Department of Commerce. 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

Robles B (2009) Academic achievement among foster care children with a disability: A grant proposal. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Greenhouse L (2005) Two Convicts From Abroad Win Hearing By Justices. New York Times A23

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