How to format your references using the Mathematical Medicine and Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Mathematical Medicine and Biology. 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:

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Cohn, M.J. (2002) Evolutionary biology: lamprey Hox genes and the origin of jaws. Nature, 416, 386–387.
A journal article with 2 authors
Chittka, L. & Schürkens, S. (2001) Successful invasion of a floral market. Nature, 411, 653.
A journal article with 3 authors
Krupic, J., Burgess, N., & O’Keefe, J. (2012) Neural representations of location composed of spatially periodic bands. Science, 337, 853–857.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Hudson, A.L., Weir, C., Moon, E., Harvie, R., Klebe, S., Clarke, S.J., Pavlakis, N., & Howell, V.M. (2014) Establishing a panel of chemo-resistant mesothelioma models for investigating chemo-resistance and identifying new treatments for mesothelioma. Sci. Rep., 4, 6152.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Beecken, W.H. & Beecken, C.A. (2017) Fraud Examination Casebook with Documents. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
An edited book
Klusch, M., Rovatsos, M., & Payne, T.R. (2006) Cooperative Information Agents X: 10th International Workshop, CIA 2006 Edinburgh, UK, September 11-13, 2006 Proceedings, vol. 4149. , Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
A chapter in an edited book
Stober, I. & Bucher, K. (2013) Potential Perspectives of Geothermal Energy Utilization. Geothermal Energy: From Theoretical Models to Exploration and Development (Bucher, K. ed). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 61–63.

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 Mathematical Medicine and Biology.

Blog post
Andrew, D. (2015) Watch A Shark And An Octopus Battle. IFLScience.

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 (2004) Telecommunications: Intelsat Privatization and the Implementation of the ORBIT Act ( No. GAO-04-891). 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
Gomes, M.A. (2017) Cognitive science approaches to actor training: Interrogating conceptual language (Doctoral dissertation).

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
Bilefsky, D. (2017) May Still Expected to Win, but Lead Narrows After Missteps. New York Times, A10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Cohn, 2002).
This sentence cites two references (Chittka & Schürkens, 2001; Cohn, 2002).

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

  • Two authors: (Chittka & Schürkens, 2001)
  • Three or more authors: (Hudson et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleMathematical Medicine and Biology
AbbreviationMath. Med. Biol.
ISSN (print)1477-8599
ISSN (online)1477-8602
ScopeGeneral Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
General Environmental Science
General Immunology and Microbiology
Applied Mathematics
Modelling and Simulation
General Medicine
General Neuroscience
Pharmacology

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