How to format your references using the Journal of Microbiological Methods citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Microbiological Methods. 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

Harris, A., 2008. What Spaceguard did. Nature 453, 1178–1179.

A journal article with 2 authors

Raper, S.C.B., Braithwaite, R.J., 2006. Low sea level rise projections from mountain glaciers and icecaps under global warming. Nature 439, 311–313.

A journal article with 3 authors

Ainsworth, S., Prain, V., Tytler, R., 2011. Science education. Drawing to learn in science. Science 333, 1096–1097.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Kaplanis, J., Gordon, A., Shor, T., Weissbrod, O., Geiger, D., Wahl, M., Gershovits, M., Markus, B., Sheikh, M., Gymrek, M., Bhatia, G., MacArthur, D.G., Price, A.L., Erlich, Y., 2018. Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives. Science 360, 171–175.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Gottlieb, I., 2009. Next Generation Excel. John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte. Ltd., 2 Clementi Loop, #02-01, Singapore 129809.

An edited book

Lefere, P., Gryspeerdt, S. (Eds.), 2010. Virtual Colonoscopy: A Practical Guide, Medical Radiology, Diagnostic Imaging. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Marques, S.P.C., Creus, G.J., 2012. Laplace Transform Solutions, in: Creus, G.J. (Ed.), Computational Viscoelasticity, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 37–49.

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 Journal of Microbiological Methods.

Blog post

Andrew, D., 2017. What ‘Walkies’ Says About Your Relationship With Your Dog [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/what-walkies-says-about-your-relationship-with-your-dog/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1982. Issues Concerning the Future Operation of the Space Transportation System (No. MASAD-83-6). 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

Dammann, N.M., 2009. Living in the edge: Community based governance in the aquatic terrestrial zone (Doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY.

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, J., 2012. ‘The Perfect Team for Brooklynland.’ New York Times MM58.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Harris, 2008).
This sentence cites two references (Harris, 2008; Raper and Braithwaite, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Raper and Braithwaite, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Kaplanis et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Microbiological Methods
Abbreviation	J. Microbiol. Methods
ISSN (print)	0167-7012
Scope	Molecular Biology Microbiology Microbiology (medical)