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

Dance A (2015) Micromanagement with light. Nature 528:291–294

A journal article with 2 authors

Floreano D, Wood RJ (2015) Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones. Nature 521:460–466

A journal article with 3 authors

Chen X, Parker D, Singh DJ (2013) Importance of non-parabolic band effects in the thermoelectric properties of semiconductors. Sci Rep 3:3168

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Mühlebach MD, Mateo M, Sinn PL, et al (2011) Adherens junction protein nectin-4 is the epithelial receptor for measles virus. Nature 480:530–533

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Unhelkar B (2005) Verification and Validation for Quality of UML 2.0 Models. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Shankar S, Srivastava RK (eds) (2012) Nutrition, Diet and Cancer. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Shan C (2010) Gesture Control for Consumer Electronics. In: Shao L, Shan C, Luo J, Etoh M (eds) Multimedia Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces: Principles, Methods and Applications. Springer, London, pp 107–128

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) Sri Lanka Becomes First Nation To Protect All Of Its Mangrove Forests. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/sri-lanka-becomes-first-nation-protect-all-its-mangrove-forests/. 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 (2009) Missouri River Navigation: Data on Commodity Shipments for Four States Served by the Missouri River and Two States Served by Both the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. 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

Detoya MS (2017) Canned Food Choices of College Students Using the Nuval ® Nutrient-Profiling System. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Belson K, Pilon M (2012) After Tying in 100, Advancing in 200. New York Times B10

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dance 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Floreano and Wood 2015; Dance 2015).

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

Two authors: (Floreano and Wood 2015)
Three or more authors: (Mühlebach et al. 2011)

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

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