How to format your references using the Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. 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

Brakenhoff RH (2011) Cancer. Another NOTCH for cancer. Science 333:1102–1103

A journal article with 2 authors

Glazman LI, Ashoori RC (2004) Physics. Coupling qubits by waves on the electron sea. Science 304:524–525

A journal article with 3 authors

González E, Arbiol J, Puntes VF (2011) Carving at the nanoscale: sequential galvanic exchange and Kirkendall growth at room temperature. Science 334:1377–1380

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Luchtmann M, Beuing O, Skalej M, et al (2014) Gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography in brain death. Sci Rep 4:3659

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Otto M (2016) Chemometrics. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, Germany

An edited book

Deep K, Nagar A, Pant M, Bansal JC (eds) (2012) Proceedings of the International Conference on Soft Computing for Problem Solving (SocProS 2011) December 20-22, 2011: Volume 1. Springer India, New Delhi

A chapter in an edited book

Levitan MA, Lavrushin YA (2009) The Late Glacial Time and Holocene of Northern Eurasia. In: Lavrushin YA (ed) Sedimentation History in the Arctic Ocean and Subarctic Seas for the Last 130 kyr. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 43–45

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 Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) LEGO Approves Production of Female Scientist Set. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/lego-approves-production-female-scientist-set/. 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 (1997) National Weather Service: Modernization Activities Affecting Northwestern Pennsylvania. 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

Charpentier DT (2017) Why Dey Talk Like Dat?: A Study of the Status of Cajun English as a Dialect or an Accent. Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana

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

Kenigsberg B (2017) Master. New York Times C12

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Brakenhoff 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Glazman and Ashoori 2004; Brakenhoff 2011).

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

Two authors: (Glazman and Ashoori 2004)
Three or more authors: (Luchtmann et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres
Abbreviation	Orig. Life Evol. Biosph.
ISSN (print)	0169-6149
ISSN (online)	1573-0875
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Space and Planetary Science General Medicine