How to format your references using the IUBMB Life citation style

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

[1]

Mazin, I. I. (2015) Superconductivity: Extraordinarily conventional. Nature 525, 40–41.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Mougi, A., and Kondoh, M. (2012) Diversity of interaction types and ecological community stability. Science (New York, N.Y.) 337, 349–351.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Catalli, K., Shim, S.-H., and Prakapenka, V. (2009) Thickness and Clapeyron slope of the post-perovskite boundary. Nature 462, 782–785.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

[1]

Fortunato, S., Bergstrom, C. T., Börner, K., Evans, J. A., Helbing, D., et al. (2018) Science of science. Science (New York, N.Y.) 359.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Brown, R. (2005) Rational Choice and Judgment. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

[1]

Sha, E., Han, S.-K., Xu, C.-Z., Kim, M.-H., Yang, L. T., et al. eds. (2006) Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing: International Conference, EUC 2006, Seoul, Korea, August 1-4, 2006. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Geller, W. (2013) Case Studies and Regional Surveys. In Acidic Pit Lakes: The Legacy of Coal and Metal Surface Mines, Environmental Science and Engineering., (Geller W, Schultze M, Kleinmann R, Wolkersdorfer C, eds.). . pp. 265–435, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 IUBMB Life.

Blog post

[1]

Luntz, S. (2016) How Malaria Species Combine To Make Infections Worse. 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office (1978) Inadequacies in Data Processing Planning in the Department of Commerce. 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

[1]

Lee, M. (2014) A graphic design curriculum development project. 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

[1]

Wagner, J. (2017) Mets Sign Six, Including deGrom, Harvey and Familia; Flores Waits for More. New York Times, D6.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	IUBMB Life
ISSN (print)	1521-6543
ISSN (online)	1521-6551
Scope