How to format your references using the Biological Cybernetics citation style

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

Kahn SD (2011) On the future of genomic data. Science 331:728–729

A journal article with 2 authors

Kang D-Y, Moon JH (2014) Lithographically defined three-dimensional pore-patterned carbon with nitrogen doping for high-performance ultrathin supercapacitor applications. Sci Rep 4:5392

A journal article with 3 authors

Belonoshko AB, Ahuja R, Johansson B (2003) Stability of the body-centred-cubic phase of iron in the Earth’s inner core. Nature 424:1032–1034

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Lee S-H, Broholm C, Ratcliff W, et al (2002) Emergent excitations in a geometrically frustrated magnet. Nature 418:856–858

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Clarke A, Thompson A, Jenkinson E, et al (2013) CBT for Appearance Anxiety. John Wiley & Sons, Oxford

An edited book

Brown BM, Lang J, Wood IG (eds) (2012) Spectral Theory, Function Spaces and Inequalities: New Techniques and Recent Trends. Springer, Basel

A chapter in an edited book

Grazioli L, Olivetti L, Zappa N, Apostolopoulos E (2009) Male Reproductive System: Normal Radiologic Anatomy. In: Grazioli L, Olivetti L (eds) Imaging of Urogenital Diseases: A Color Atlas. Springer, Milano, pp 47–64

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 Biological Cybernetics.

Blog post

Andrews R (2017) Cats And Dogs Remember Things In The Same Way. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/cats-dogs-remember-things-same-way/. 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 (1999) Year 2000 Computing Crisis: Readiness of the Oil and Gas Industries. 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

Dashevsky-Kerdman I (2009) The meeting of one hundred ways. Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute

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

Murphy MJO (2015) Weekend Entertainments From the Archives of the New York Times. New York Times C36

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Kahn 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Kahn 2011; Kang and Moon 2014).

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

Two authors: (Kang and Moon 2014)
Three or more authors: (Lee et al. 2002)

About the journal

Full journal title	Biological Cybernetics
Abbreviation	Biol. Cybern.
ISSN (print)	0340-1200
ISSN (online)	1432-0770
Scope	Biotechnology General Computer Science