How to format your references using the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology citation style

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

Zimov SA (2005) Essays on science and society. Pleistocene Park: return of the mammoth’s ecosystem. Science 308:796–798

A journal article with 2 authors

Finkelstein A, Taubman S (2015) Health care policy. Randomize evaluations to improve health care delivery. Science 347:720–722

A journal article with 3 authors

Karsai M, Perra N, Vespignani A (2014) Time varying networks and the weakness of strong ties. Sci Rep 4:4001

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Di Cristo G, Berardi N, Cancedda L, et al (2001) Requirement of ERK activation for visual cortical plasticity. Science 292:2337–2340

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Britton M (2015) YouthNation. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Rahman MS, Fujita S (eds) (2010) WALCOM: Algorithms and Computation: 4th International Workshop, WALCOM 2010, Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 10-12, 2010. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Séguy I, Buchet L (2013) Age at Death: Current Approaches and Methods. In: Buchet L (ed) Handbook of Palaeodemography. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 85–98

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 Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.

Blog post

Davis J (2017) Immunotherapy Trial Puts A Third Of Terminal Cancer Patients Into Remission, But At A Cost. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/immunotherapy-trial-puts-a-third-of-terminal-cancer-patients-into-remission-but-at-a-cost/. 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 (2017) Health Information Technology: HHS Should Assess the Effectiveness of Its Efforts to Enhance Patient Access to and Use of Electronic Health Information. 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

Coleman MJ (2010) Surface accuracy analysis and mathematical modeling of deployable large aperture elastic antenna reflectors. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University

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

Hodgman J (2017) Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman. New York Times MM20

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Zimov 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Zimov 2005; Finkelstein and Taubman 2015).

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

Two authors: (Finkelstein and Taubman 2015)
Three or more authors: (Di Cristo et al. 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
Abbreviation	Bull. Math. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0092-8240
ISSN (online)	1522-9602
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Computational Theory and Mathematics General Environmental Science Immunology General Mathematics General Neuroscience Pharmacology