Every scientific journal has its own style for handling references so you must follow the style guidelines carefully for your paper’s destination. Each paper will be referenced both at the end of any sentences that state information that came from that paper, and in the bibliography/references section.

For in-line references you must reference sources for any information that is not common knowledge of someone in the general field (knowledge of general biology). These usually are either numbered [1], or use the author’s name and publication date (Smith et. al., 2006). Numbered references are numbered according to the order in which the reference appears in the paper. They should then be listed in numerical order in the references section. Citations by authors’ names should use the format of (Smith 2006) for papers with only one author, (Smith and Mack, 2006) for papers with two authors and (Smith et. al., 2006) for papers with more than two authors. The full references should be listed in alphabetical order (by author’s last name) in the references section of the paper.

The reference section of the paper should list any paper cited in the work and include a list of authors, publication year, title of article, journal title, volume and page numbers. The references should not include web addresses for the site where you downloaded the paper. This information can be used by readers to easily track down a reference to read themselves.