How to format your references using the Open Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Open 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	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

Sibley LD. 2004 Intracellular parasite invasion strategies. Science 304, 248–253.

A journal article with 2 authors

Hall PS, Kincaid C. 2001 Diapiric flow at subduction zones: a recipe for rapid transport. Science 292, 2472–2475.

A journal article with 3 authors

Schuch R, Nelson D, Fischetti VA. 2002 A bacteriolytic agent that detects and kills Bacillus anthracis. Nature 418, 884–889.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Warne T, Serrano-Vega MJ, Baker JG, Moukhametzianov R, Edwards PC, Henderson R, Leslie AGW, Tate CG, Schertler GFX. 2008 Structure of a beta1-adrenergic G-protein-coupled receptor. Nature 454, 486–491.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Fabozzi FJ, Kothari V. 2008 Introduction to Securitization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

González-Aguilar H, Ugalde E, editors. 2015 Nonlinear Dynamics New Directions: Models and Applications. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Wenige L, Ruhland J. 2016 Flexible On-the-Fly Recommendations from Linked Open Data Repositories. In Business Information Systems: 19th International Conference, BIS 2016, Leipzig, Germany, July, 6-8, 2016, Proceedings (eds W Abramowicz, R Alt, B Franczyk), pp. 43–54. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

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 Open Biology.

Blog post

Hamilton K. 2016 So You Want To Build A Death Star? Here’s How To Get Started. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/physics/so-you-want-to-build-a-death-star-heres-how-to-get-started/ (accessed on 30 October 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. 1995 NCAA Student Athlete Pell Grants.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Davenport LC. 2008 Behavior and ecology of the Giant Otter (Pteronura brasiliensis) in oxbow lakes of the Manú Biosphere Reserve, Perú. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.

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

Koblin J. 2017 For Revival, MTV Pivots To Its Past. New York Times, 30 July. , 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	Open Biology
Abbreviation	Open Biol.
ISSN (online)	2046-2441
Scope