How to format your references using the Applied and Environmental Microbiology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM). 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 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

Lederman L. 2007. The God particle et al. Nature 448:310–312.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ekström G, Stark CP. 2013. Simple scaling of catastrophic landslide dynamics. Science 339:1416–1419.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yoshida M-A, Yura K, Ogura A. 2014. Cephalopod eye evolution was modulated by the acquisition of Pax-6 splicing variants. Sci Rep 4:4256.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Wong J, Krisch M, Farber DL, Occelli F, Schwartz AJ, Chiang T-C, Wall M, Boro C, Xu R. 2003. Phonon dispersions of fcc delta-plutonium-gallium by inelastic x-ray scattering. Science 301:1078–1080.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lee JC, McCormick NJ. 2011. Risk and Safety Analysis of Nuclear Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

2014. Controlled Natural Language: 4th International Workshop, CNL 2014, Galway, Ireland, August 20-22, 2014. Proceedings. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Pereira B de B, Pereira CA de B. 2016. Support and Simulation Methods, p. 73–86. In Pereira, CA de B (ed.), Model Choice in Nonnested Families. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

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 Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Blog post

Andrew E. 2015. Mice Skin Got Thinner After Three Months In Space. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/mice-skin-got-thinner-after-three-months-space/. Retrieved 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. 1985. Institutional Aid Under Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965. 127541. 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

Cetin B. 2012. Leaching of metals from high carbon fly ash mixed soils. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD.

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

Dynarski S. 2014. Where College Ratings Hits the Wall. New York Times.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Abbreviation	Appl. Environ. Microbiol.
ISSN (print)	0099-2240
ISSN (online)	1098-5336
Scope	Food Science Biotechnology Ecology Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology