How to format your references using the Letters in Applied Microbiology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Letters in Applied Microbiology (LAM). 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

Ward, C.D. (2000) Bordeaux mixture. Nature. 404, 337.

A journal article with 2 authors

Deeks, S.G. and Barré-Sinoussi, F. (2012) Public health: Towards a cure for HIV. Nature. 487, 293–294.

A journal article with 3 authors

Lutolf, M.P., Gilbert, P.M. and Blau, H.M. (2009) Designing materials to direct stem-cell fate. Nature. 462, 433–441.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Lee, S.M., Byeon, H.J., Lee, J.H., Baek, D.H., Lee, K.H., Hong, J.S. and Lee, S.-H. (2014) Self-adhesive epidermal carbon nanotube electronics for tether-free long-term continuous recording of biosignals. Sci Rep. 4, 6074.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bauer, E. (2010) Design for Reliability. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Falanga, M., Belloni, T., Casella, P., Gilfanov, M., Jonker, P. and King, A. (Eds.) (2015) The Physics of Accretion onto Black Holes. Space Sciences Series of ISSI. New York, NY: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Najeeb, U., Mirza, M.Y., Jilani, G., Mubashir, A.K. and Zhou, W.J. (2012) Sesame. In Technological Innovations in Major World Oil Crops, Volume 1: Breeding ed. Gupta, S.K. pp.131–145. New York, NY: Springer.

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 Letters in Applied Microbiology.

Blog post

Carpineti, A. (2016) Mars Has A Type Of Dune We’ve Never Seen On Earth [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-has-a-type-of-dune-weve-never-seen-on-earth/.

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 (2015) Women in STEM Research: Better Data and Information Sharing Could Improve Oversight of Federal Grant-making and Title IX Compliance ( No. GAO-16-14). 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

Brown, E.R. (2011) Comparison of instructional techniques of high school economics teachers in Georgia and Shenzhen, China. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minneapolis, MN.

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

Pilon, M. (2013) New York City Marathon to Have Tighter Security. New York Times. B12.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Ward, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Ward, 2000; Deeks & Barré-Sinoussi, 2012).

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

Two authors: (Deeks & Barré-Sinoussi, 2012)
Three authors: (Lutolf, Gilbert & Blau, 2009)
4 or more authors: (Lee et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Letters in Applied Microbiology
ISSN (print)	0266-8254
ISSN (online)	1472-765X
Scope