How to format your references using the Biology Letters citation style

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

Woo HJ. 2013 Stationary distribution of self-organized states and biological information generation. Sci. Rep. 3, 3329.

A journal article with 2 authors

Paul WE, Mage RG. 2000 Elvin A. Kabat (1914-2000). Nature 407, 316.

A journal article with 3 authors

Agrawal T, Schu P, Medigeshi GR. 2013 Adaptor protein complexes-1 and 3 are involved at distinct stages of flavivirus life-cycle. Sci. Rep. 3, 1813.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Celler K, Hödl I, Simone A, Battin TJ, Picioreanu C. 2014 A mass-spring model unveils the morphogenesis of phototrophic Diatoma biofilms. Sci. Rep. 4, 3649.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bruen AA, Forcinito MA. 2004 Cryptography, Information Theory, and Error-Correction. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Murphy MJ, editor. 2011 Molecular Diagnostics in Dermatology and Dermatopathology. 1st edn. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.

A chapter in an edited book

Khosravy M, Alsharif MR, Yamashita K. 2009 An Efficient ICA Based Approach to Multiuser Detection in MIMO OFDM Systems. In Multi-Carrier Systems & Solutions 2009 (eds S Plass, A Dammann, S Kaiser, K Fazel), pp. 47–56. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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 Biology Letters.

Blog post

Fang J. 2015 Mudskipper Fish Eat on Land Using Their Tongue Made of Water. IFLScience.

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. 2008 Aviation Security: Transportation Security Administration Has Strengthened Planning to Guide Investments in Key Aviation Security Programs, but More Work Remains.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Garcia RD. 2008 Designing an autonomous helicopter testbed: From conception through implementation. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

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

Markoff J. 2016 Creating a Safer Phone Battery (This One Won’t Catch Fire). New York Times, 12 December. , B1.

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	Biology Letters
Abbreviation	Biol. Lett.
ISSN (print)	1744-9561
ISSN (online)	1744-957X
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous)