How to format your references using the Metabolic Engineering Communications citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Metabolic Engineering Communications. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

RajBhandary, U.L., 2011. Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011). Nature 480, 322.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kim, K.-H., Park, Q.-H., 2013. Perfect anti-reflection from first principles. Sci. Rep. 3, 1062.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bradshaw, D., Warren, J.E., Rosseinsky, M.J., 2007. Reversible concerted ligand substitution at alternating metal sites in an extended solid. Science 315, 977–980.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Youn, D.H., Jang, J.-W., Kim, J.Y., Jang, J.S., Choi, S.H., Lee, J.S., 2014. Fabrication of graphene-based electrode in less than a minute through hybrid microwave annealing. Sci. Rep. 4, 5492.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Center for Chemical Process Safety, 2007. Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Lu, Y. (Ed.), 2010. Science & Technology in China: A Roadmap to 2050: Strategic General Report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Richter, J., 2016. Centralizers and Pseudo-Degree Functions, in: Silvestrov, S., Rančić, M. (Eds.), Engineering Mathematics II: Algebraic, Stochastic and Analysis Structures for Networks, Data Classification and Optimization, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 65–73.

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 Communications.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2014. Watch Diver Fend Off Sea Lion Attack [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, 1980. A Look at NASA’s Aircraft Energy Efficiency Program (No. PSAD-80-50). 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

Reyes, J.M., 2010. A support group for adults with rheumatoid arthritis (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

Williams, J., 2016. ‘The Chosen’ at 50. New York Times BR4.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (RajBhandary, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Kim and Park, 2013; RajBhandary, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Kim and Park, 2013)
Three or more authors: (Youn et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Metabolic Engineering Communications
Abbreviation	Metab. Eng. Commun.
ISSN (print)	2214-0301
Scope