How to format your references using the Genetics and Molecular Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Genetics and Molecular Biology. 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

Minetti AE (2003) Physiology: efficiency of equine express postal systems. Nature 426:785–786.

A journal article with 2 authors

Tamura K and Schimmel P (2004) Chiral-selective aminoacylation of an RNA minihelix. Science 305:1253.

A journal article with 3 authors

Aravanis AM, Pyle JL and Tsien RW (2003) Single synaptic vesicles fusing transiently and successively without loss of identity. Nature 423:643–647.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Li X-Y, Ko H-G, Chen T, Descalzi G, Koga K, Wang H, Kim SS, Shang Y, Kwak C, Park S-W et al. (2010) Alleviating neuropathic pain hypersensitivity by inhibiting PKMzeta in the anterior cingulate cortex. Science 330:1400–1404.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bolstad WM and Curran JM (2016) Introduction to Bayesian Statistics, Third Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Lakshmanan V, Gilleland E, McGovern A and Tingley M (2015) Machine Learning and Data Mining Approaches to Climate Science: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Climate Informatics. Springer International Publishing, Cham

A chapter in an edited book

Rawlings JB (2015) Moving Horizon Estimation. In: Baillieul J and Samad T (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems and Control. Springer, London, pp 799–804

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 Genetics and Molecular Biology.

Blog post

Andrew E (2014) Strange Reptile Fossil Discovered in China. In: IFLScience. 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 (2011) Fiscal Year 2011 Agreed-Upon Procedures for Excise Tax Distributions to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. 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

Murray E (2012) California community college athletic directors lived experience and perceptions about financing issues with athletic programs. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

Vecsey G (2013) Where Are the Yankees I Loved to Hate? New York Times B13.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Minetti 2003).
This sentence cites two references (Minetti 2003; Tamura and Schimmel 2004).

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

Two authors: (Tamura and Schimmel 2004)
Three or more authors: (Li et al. 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Genetics and Molecular Biology
Abbreviation	Genet. Mol. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1415-4757
ISSN (online)	1678-4685
Scope	Genetics Molecular Biology