How to format your references using the Achievements in the Life Sciences citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Achievements in the Life 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:

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 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

Smith, C., 2006. Structural biology. Two geometric solutions to a transporting problem. Science 311, 182–183.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kennel, C., Dressler, A., 2014. Space science. Coping with uncertainty in space science planning. Science 343, 140–141.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yin, J., Sun, Y., Ge, F., 2014. Reduced plant nutrition under elevated CO₂ depresses the immunocompetence of cotton bollworm against its endoparasite. Sci. Rep. 4, 4538.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Xiang, T., Wang, L.-R., Ma, L., Han, Z.-Y., Wang, R., Cheng, C., Xia, Y., Qin, H., Zhao, C.-S., 2014. From commodity polymers to functional polymers. Sci. Rep. 4, 4604.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bajpai, P., 2010. Environmentally Friendly Production of Pulp and Paper. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Bartnik, R., 2016. Optimum Investment Strategy in the Power Industry: Mathematical Models, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Schiehlen, W., Hu, B., Seifried, R., 2005. Multiscale Methods for Multibody Systems with Impacts, in: Ambrósio, J.A.C. (Ed.), Advances in Computational Multibody Systems, Computational Methods in Applied Sciences. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 95–124.

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 Achievements in the Life Sciences.

Blog post

O`Callaghan, J., 2015. How To Make A Diamond With Acid [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/chemistry/new-theory-diamond-formation-acidic-water-proposed/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1987. Railroad Regulation: Shipper Experiences and Current Issues in ICC Regulation of Rail Rates (No. RCED-87-119). 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

Flynn, M.J., 2013. Lifeguard employability skills (Doctoral dissertation). 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

Strasser, S., 2017. What’s in Your Microwave Oven? New York Times A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Smith, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Kennel and Dressler, 2014; Smith, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Kennel and Dressler, 2014)
Three or more authors: (Xiang et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Achievements in the Life Sciences
ISSN (print)	2078-1520
Scope