How to format your references using the Journal of Biological Education citation style

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

Berg, Paul. 2008. “Meetings That Changed the World: Asilomar 1975: DNA Modification Secured.” Nature 455 (7211): 290–291.

A journal article with 2 authors

Fairchild, Amy L., and Ronald Bayer. 2004. “Public Health. Ethics and the Conduct of Public Health Surveillance.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 303 (5658): 631–632.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kim, Sun-Yong, Toshio Hakoshima, and Ken Kitano. 2013. “Structure of the RecQ C-Terminal Domain of Human Bloom Syndrome Protein.” Scientific Reports 3 (November 2013): 3294.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

López-Aranda, Manuel F., Juan F. López-Téllez, Irene Navarro-Lobato, Mariam Masmudi-Martín, Antonia Gutiérrez, and Zafar U. Khan. 2009. “Role of Layer 6 of V2 Visual Cortex in Object-Recognition Memory.” Science (New York, N.Y.) 325 (5936): 87–89.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

O’Kelly, Michael, and Bohdana Ratitch. 2014. Clinical Trials with Missing Data. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An edited book

Fortis, Marco. 2015. The Automatic Packaging Machinery Sector in Italy and Germany. Edited by Monica Carminati. SpringerBriefs in Business. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Berghmans, Francis, Sophie Eve, and Marcel Held. 2008. “An Introduction to Reliability of Optical Components and Fiber Optic Sensors.” In Optical Waveguide Sensing and Imaging, edited by Wojtek J. Bock, Israel Gannot, and Stoyan Tanev, 73–100. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series. 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 Journal of Biological Education.

Blog post

Andrew, Elise. 2015. “Scientists Grow Miniature Brains From Skin Cells Of Autistic Patients.” IFLScience, IFLScience, July 17. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/growing-miniature-brains-gives-insight-autism/.

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. 2006. Public Transportation: New Starts Program Is in a Period of Transition. GAO-06-819. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Tzillah, Aisha. 2009. “The Emissions of Selected Air Pollutants from Biodiesel Fuel Usage.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati.

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

Brantley, Ben. 2016. “Insanity Most Genteel.” New York Times, October 6, 2016.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Berg 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Berg 2008; Fairchild and Bayer 2004).

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

Two authors: (Fairchild and Bayer 2004)
Three authors: (Kim, Hakoshima, and Kitano 2013)
4 or more authors: (López-Aranda et al. 2009)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Biological Education
Abbreviation	J. Biol. Educ.
ISSN (print)	0021-9266
ISSN (online)	2157-6009
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Education