How to format your references using the Trends in Biochemical Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Trends in Biochemical Sciences. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
1.
Moore, P. (2003) Playing with the pieces. Nature 426, 725
A journal article with 2 authors
1.
Hsieh-Wilson, L.C. and Griffin, M.E. (2013) Chemistry. Improving biologic drugs via total chemical synthesis. Science 342, 1332–1333
A journal article with 3 authors
1.
Alvarado, D. et al. (2009) ErbB2 resembles an autoinhibited invertebrate epidermal growth factor receptor. Nature 461, 287–291
A journal article with 3 or more authors
1.
Huisman, J. et al. (2006) Reduced mixing generates oscillations and chaos in the oceanic deep chlorophyll maximum. Nature 439, 322–325

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
1.
Narang, R.K. (2013) Inside the Black Box, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
1.
Zuidam, N.J. and Nedovic, V., eds. (2010) Encapsulation Technologies for Active Food Ingredients and Food Processing, Springer
A chapter in an edited book
1.
Achterbergh, J. and Vriens, D. (2010) Epilogue to Part I: The Two “Archai” Combined. In Organizations: Social Systems Conducting Experiments (Vriens, D., ed), pp. 167–177, Springer

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 Trends in Biochemical Sciences.

Blog post
1.
Davis, J. (2016) Arctic Sea Ice Is Failing To Grow At The Expected Rate. IFLScience. [Online]. [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
1.
Government Accountability Office (1988) Aviation Services: Automation and Consolidation of Flight Service Stations, U.S. Government Printing Office

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation
1.
Richardson, V.M. (2013) In vitro thyroid hormone metabolism: Effects of nuclear receptor activation on the metabolic profiles of thyroxine in rat and human hepatocytes. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina

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
1.
Cowen, T. (2014) The Technological Fix to InequalityNew York Times, BU7

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 titleTrends in Biochemical Sciences
AbbreviationTrends Biochem. Sci.
ISSN (print)0968-0004
ScopeBiochemistry
Molecular Biology

Other styles