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

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

Harden N (2005) Cell biology. Of grainy heads and broken skins. Science 308:364–365

A journal article with 2 authors

Shapiro L, Losick R (2013) Retrospective. Francois Jacob (1920-2013). Science 340:939

A journal article with 3 authors

Paul JW, West JP, Gitler AD (2014) Cell Biology. Clogging information flow in ALS. Science 345:1118–1119

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhang H-T, Chen Z, Vicsek T, et al (2014) Route-dependent switch between hierarchical and egalitarian strategies in pigeon flocks. Sci Rep 4:5805

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Perez A (2016) VoLTE and ViLTE. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Brandes SB (ed) (2008) Urethral Reconstructive Surgery. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ

A chapter in an edited book

Bal-Woźniak T (2015) Creating Sustainable Enterprise Using the Substantive Innovativeness Model. In: O’Riordan L, Zmuda P, Heinemann S (eds) New Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility: Locating the Missing Link. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, pp 89–108

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 Evolution.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Regular Coffee Consumption May Help Protect Against A Form Of Skin Cancer. 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 (2010) DOD Business Transformation: Improved Management Oversight of Business System Modernization Efforts Needed. 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

Hoffer H (2012) Aesthetics of destruction: Music and the worldview of Ikari Shinji in “Neon Genesis Evangelion.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona

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

Winerip M, Schwirtz M (2015) Federal Inquiry on Rikers Turns to Union Chief. 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 (Harden 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Harden 2005; Shapiro and Losick 2013).

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

Two authors: (Shapiro and Losick 2013)
Three or more authors: (Zhang et al. 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Journal of Molecular Evolution
Abbreviation	J. Mol. Evol.
ISSN (print)	0022-2844
ISSN (online)	1432-1432
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Genetics Molecular Biology