How to format your references using the Metabolic Engineering citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Metabolic Engineering. 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

Roobol, M., 2015. Perspective: Enforce the clinical guidelines. Nature 528, S123.

A journal article with 2 authors

Convey, P., Stevens, M.I., 2007. Ecology. Antarctic biodiversity. Science 317, 1877–1878.

A journal article with 3 authors

Oberholzer, S., Sukhorukov, E.V., Schönenberger, C., 2002. Crossover between classical and quantum shot noise in chaotic cavities. Nature 415, 765–767.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Guan, N., Shin, H.-D., Chen, R.R., Li, J., Liu, L., Du, G., Chen, J., 2014. Understanding of how Propionibacterium acidipropionici respond to propionic acid stress at the level of proteomics. Sci. Rep. 4, 6951.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Seabridge, A., Morgan, S., 2010. Air Travel and Health. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Bal, P.M., Kooij, D.T.A.M., Rousseau, D.M. (Eds.), 2015. Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Arya, K., 2016. Basics of Group Policy Troubleshooting, in: Bettany, A. (Ed.), Windows Group Policy Troubleshooting: A Best Practice Guide for Managing Users and PCs Through Group Policy. Apress, Berkeley, CA, pp. 129–149.

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 Metabolic Engineering.

Blog post

Luntz, S., 2016. Gene Found That Harms Males, Not Females [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 2006. Joint Strike Fighter: DOD Plans to Enter Production before Testing Demonstrates Acceptable Performance (No. GAO-06-356). 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

Gandarilla, A.H., 2009. Family preservation: A content analysis of literature (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

(nyt), S.K., 2002. World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Orthodox Church Berates Vatican. 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 (Roobol, 2015).
This sentence cites two references (Convey and Stevens, 2007; Roobol, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Convey and Stevens, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Guan et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Metabolic Engineering
Abbreviation	Metab. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1096-7176
Scope	Biotechnology Bioengineering Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

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