How to format your references using the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 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

McCauley DJ. 2006 Selling out on nature. Nature 443, 27–28.

A journal article with 2 authors

Siders CW, Cavalleri A. 2003 Materials science. Creating transient crystal structures with light. Science 300, 591–592.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lee A, Dennis C, Campbell P. 2007 Nature’s guide for mentors. Nature 447, 791–797.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Dinse HR, Ragert P, Pleger B, Schwenkreis P, Tegenthoff M. 2003 Pharmacological modulation of perceptual learning and associated cortical reorganization. Science 301, 91–94.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Pearson D, Grace C. 2012 Weight Management. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,.

An edited book

Catarci T, Ferro N, Poggi A, editors. 2014 Bridging Between Cultural Heritage Institutions: 9th Italian Research Conference, IRCDL 2013, Rome, Italy, January 31–February 1, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Hart WE, Laird C, Watson J-P, Woodruff DL. 2012 Model Components: Sets and Parameters. In Pyomo – Optimization Modeling in Python (eds C Laird, J-P Watson, DL Woodruff), pp. 43–55. Boston, MA: Springer US.

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 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Blog post

Hale T. 2016 Japan’s Cherry Blossom Festivals Are Becoming Threatened By Beetles. IFLScience. See https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/japan-cherry-blossom-festival-becoming-threatened-beetles/ (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. 1998 Child Support Enforcement: Certification Process for State Information Systems.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Royalty AR. 2015 U.S. Military Advisors in Iraq: A Phenomenological Research Study on the Role of National Culture on Tactical Decision-making during Wartime. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Kelly C. 2005 Americans Are Flocking to Canada’s Pristine Gulf Islands. New York Times, 1 May. , 1111.

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	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Abbreviation	Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci.
ISSN (print)	0962-8436
ISSN (online)	1471-2970
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology