How to format your references using the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Molecular Cell Biology (JMCB). 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

Schrag, D.P. (2000). Of ice and elephants. Nature 404, 23–24.

A journal article with 2 authors

Druzd, D., and Scheiermann, C. (2013). Immunology. Some monocytes got rhythm. Science 341, 1462–1464.

A journal article with 3 authors

Galbraith, C.G. et al. (2007). Polymerizing actin fibers position integrins primed to probe for adhesion sites. Science 315, 992–995.

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Ma, W. et al. (2018). In-plane anisotropic and ultra-low-loss polaritons in a natural van der Waals crystal. Nature 562, 557–562.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Jiang, J., and Zhang, C. (2015). Fundamentals and Applications of Lithium-ion Batteries in Electric Drive Vehicles Singapore: John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd.

An edited book

Bonnin, M. (2012). The Knee Joint: Surgical Techniques and Strategies Paris: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Tsekouras, G.E., and Tsolakis, D.M. (2013). Fuzzy Clustering-Based Vector Quantization for Image Compression. In: Computational Intelligence in Image Processing, A. Chatterjee, and P. Siarry (eds). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 93–105.

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 Molecular Cell Biology.

Blog post

Davis, J. (2017). Coral Reefs Generate $36 Billion In Tourism, So We Should Take Better Care Of Them. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/coral-reefs-generate-36-billion-in-tourism-so-we-should-take-better-care-of-them/.

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 (2009). High Speed Passenger Rail: Future Development Will Depend on Addressing Financial and Other Challenges and Establishing a Clear Federal Role Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Beeler, M.C. (2010). Disordered Ultracold Two-Dimensional Bose Gases. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park.

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

Sophia Kishkovsky; Compiled by (2004). Arts, Briefly; High Season for Russian Art in London Auctions. New York Times E4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schrag, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Schrag, 2000; Druzd and Scheiermann, 2013).

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

Two authors: (Druzd and Scheiermann, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Ma et al., 2018)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Molecular Cell Biology
Abbreviation	J. Mol. Cell Biol.
ISSN (print)	1674-2788
ISSN (online)	1759-4685
Scope	Cell Biology Genetics Molecular Biology General Medicine