How to format your references using the 3 Biotech citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for 3 Biotech. 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

Braun R (2001) Astronomy. Galaxy clusters reveal their secrets. Science 293:1781–1782

A journal article with 2 authors

Hotchkiss RS, Sherwood ER (2015) Immunology. Getting sepsis therapy right. Science 347:1201–1202

A journal article with 3 authors

Yamamoto-Kawai M, Carmack E, McLaughlin F (2006) Nitrogen balance and Arctic throughflow. Nature 443:43

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Akashi K, Traver D, Miyamoto T, Weissman IL (2000) A clonogenic common myeloid progenitor that gives rise to all myeloid lineages. Nature 404:193–197

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Davey KJ (2014) Building Winning Algorithmic Trading Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Fujiwara H (2015) Harmonic Analysis on Exponential Solvable Lie Groups. Springer Japan, Tokyo

A chapter in an edited book

Deplazes A, Ganguli-Mitra A, Biller-Andorno N (2010) The Ethics of Synthetic Biology: Outlining the Agenda. In: Schmidt M, Kelle A, Ganguli-Mitra A, Vriend H (eds) Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 65–79

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 3 Biotech.

Blog post

Evans K (2017) World’s First Skyscraper Designed To Hang Suspended From An Asteroid. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/worlds-first-skyscraper-designed-to-hang-suspended-from-an-asteroid/. 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 (1990) Shared Resources Project: Evaluation Report. 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

Glover D (2010) Reconciling the doctrine of original sin with principles of moral responsibility. 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

Pilon M (2012) A Card-Counting Mix Of Blackjack, Bibles, Cash and Conscience. New York Times D3

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Braun 2001).
This sentence cites two references (Braun 2001; Hotchkiss and Sherwood 2015).

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

Two authors: (Hotchkiss and Sherwood 2015)
Three or more authors: (Akashi et al. 2000)

About the journal

Full journal title	3 Biotech
Abbreviation	3 Biotech
ISSN (print)	2190-572X
ISSN (online)	2190-5738
Scope	Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) Biotechnology Environmental Science (miscellaneous)