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

Dolgin, E., 2011. Research technique: the murine candidate. Nature 474, S14-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Saunders, M.A., Lea, A.S., 2008. Large contribution of sea surface warming to recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity. Nature 451, 557–560.

A journal article with 3 authors

Westfall, P.J., Ballon, D.R., Thorner, J., 2004. When the stress of your environment makes you go HOG wild. Science 306, 1511–1512.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Boudker, O., Ryan, R.M., Yernool, D., Shimamoto, K., Gouaux, E., 2007. Coupling substrate and ion binding to extracellular gate of a sodium-dependent aspartate transporter. Nature 445, 387–393.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Piegorsch, W.W., Bailer, A.J., 2005. Analyzing Environmental Data. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Falk, M., 2011. Laws of Small Numbers: Extremes and Rare Events. Springer, Basel.

A chapter in an edited book

Zelarayán, L.C., Zafiriou, M.P., Zimmermann, W.-H., 2016. Myocardial Pharmacoregeneration, in: Steinhoff, G. (Ed.), Regenerative Medicine - from Protocol to Patient: 5. Regenerative Therapies II. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 111–143.

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, E., 2015. Researchers Find Four New Species Of Tooth-Frogs [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 2000. VA Information Technology: Progress Continues Although Vulnerabilities Remain (No. T-AIMD-00-321). 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

Gonzalez, H.M., 2017. DiaBeaThis Healthcare Clinic Business Plan (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Grynbaum, M.M., 2017. Kelly Presses Conspiracy Theorist in Edited Interview. New York Times B6.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dolgin, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Dolgin, 2011; Saunders and Lea, 2008).

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

Two authors: (Saunders and Lea, 2008)
Three or more authors: (Boudker et al., 2007)

About the journal

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