How to format your references using the Metabolism Open citation style

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

[1]

Graves JAM. In retrospect: Twenty-five years of the sex-determining gene. Nature 2015;528:343–4.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Matthews HD, Solomon S. Atmosphere. Irreversible does not mean unavoidable. Science 2013;340:438–9.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Joughin I, Alley RB, Holland DM. Ice-sheet response to oceanic forcing. Science 2012;338:1172–6.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Smith O, Clapham A, Rose P, Liu Y, Wang J, Allaby RG. A complete ancient RNA genome: identification, reconstruction and evolutionary history of archaeological Barley Stripe Mosaic Virus. Sci Rep 2014;4:4003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Saccone C, Pesole G. Handbook of Comparative Genomics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2005.

An edited book

[1]

Bader DA, Parashar M, Sridhar V, Prasanna VK, editors. High Performance Computing – HiPC 2005: 12th International Conference, Goa, India, December 18-21, 2005. Proceedings. vol. 3769. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2005.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Wu JX, Ro K, Yeh MW. Jan Wolff and Israel L. Chaikoff. In: Pasieka JL, Lee JA, editors. Surgical Endocrinopathies: Clinical Management and the Founding Figures, Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015, p. 21–4.

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 Metabolism Open.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew D. A Tiny Version Of Hell On Earth Exists In Cleveland, Ohio. IFLScience 2016.

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office. Federal Research: Evaluation of Small Business Innovation Research Can Be Strengthened. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1999.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Stevens S. Aboard and Beyond. Doctoral dissertation. George Washington University, 2017.

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

[1]

Crow K. Neighbors Defend Park From a Soccer Invasion. New York Times 2002:148.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [1].
This sentence cites two references [1,2].
This sentence cites four references [1–4].

About the journal

Full journal title	Metabolism Open
ISSN (print)	2589-9368
Scope