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

May, R.M., 2010. Ecology. Tropical arthropod species, more or less? Science 329, 41–42.

A journal article with 2 authors

Barnes, W., Sambles, R., 2004. Physics. Only skin deep. Science 305, 785–786.

A journal article with 3 authors

Zhang, M., Atkinson, K.R., Baughman, R.H., 2004. Multifunctional carbon nanotube yarns by downsizing an ancient technology. Science 306, 1358–1361.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Ouyang, Y., Shi, H., Fu, R., Wu, D., 2013. Highly monodisperse microporous polymeric and carbonaceous nanospheres with multifunctional properties. Sci. Rep. 3, 1430.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Black, R., 2016. Pragmatic Software Testing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana.

An edited book

King, A. (Ed.), 2008. Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation: 17th International Symposium, LOPSTR 2007, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, August 23-24, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Soga, M., Kashimori, Y., 2008. Neural Mechanism for Extracting Object Features Critical for Visual Categorization Task, in: Ishikawa, M., Doya, K., Miyamoto, H., Yamakawa, T. (Eds.), Neural Information Processing: 14th International Conference, ICONIP 2007, Kitakyushu, Japan, November 13-16, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 27–36.

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. Extra “Mystery” Neurons Make Males Prioritize Sex [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/extra-mystery-neurons-make-males-prioritize-sex/ (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, 1987. Aircraft Modifications: Overestimates of Costs Generate Excess Funds (No. NSIAD-87-199BR). 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

Binkley, P.M., 2012. Relationship of Graduate Student Involvement to Graduate Alumni Donor Behavior (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Tabuchi, H., 2017. Kochs’ Strategy to Court Allies: Gospel and Gas. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (May, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (Barnes and Sambles, 2004; May, 2010).

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

Two authors: (Barnes and Sambles, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Ouyang et al., 2013)

About the journal

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