How to format your references using the AIMS Molecular Science citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for AIMS Molecular Science. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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

Herrling P (2006) Experiments in social responsibility. Nature 439: 267–268.

A journal article with 2 authors

Trinkle-Mulcahy L, Lamond AI (2007) Toward a high-resolution view of nuclear dynamics. Science 318: 1402–1407.

A journal article with 3 authors

Karan S, Jiang Z, Livingston AG (2015) MEMBRANE FILTRATION. Sub-10 nm polyamide nanofilms with ultrafast solvent transport for molecular separation. Science 348: 1347–1351.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Porath D, Bezryadin A, de Vries S, et al. (2000) Direct measurement of electrical transport through DNA molecules. Nature 403: 635–638.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Rochange C, Uhrig S, Sainrat P (2013) Time-Predictable Architectures, Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Nunno GD, Øksendal B, Proske F (Eds.) (2009) Malliavin Calculus for Lévy Processes with Applications to Finance, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Teng Z, Zhang B (2014) An Optimization Method of Fusing Multiple Decisions in Object Detection, In: Peng W-C, Wang H, Bailey J, et al. (Eds.), Trends and Applications in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: PAKDD 2014 International Workshops: DANTH, BDM, MobiSocial, BigEC, CloudSD, MSMV-MBI, SDA, DMDA-Health, ALSIP, SocNet, DMBIH, BigPMA,Tainan, Taiwan, May 13-16, 2014. Revised Selected Papers, Cham, Springer International Publishing, 29–35.

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 AIMS Molecular Science.

Blog post

Andrews R (2016) IFLScience, Brand New Marine Reptile Once Dominated The Seas As Dinosaurs Ruled The Land, 2016. Available from: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/brand-new-marine-reptile-once-dominated-the-seas-as-dinosaurs-ruled-the-land/.

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 (2015) Geospatial Data: Progress Needed on Identifying Expenditures, Building and Utilizing a Data Infrastructure, and Reducing Duplicative Efforts [Reissued March 18, 2015], 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

Boysen J (2008) The ESCRT machinery, required for endosomal trafficking, is a pH-signaling platform.

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

Wagner J (2017) Bruce Finds His Swing by Studying the Stats. New York Times B7.

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	AIMS Molecular Science
ISSN (online)	2372-0301
Scope