How to format your references using the Methods citation style

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

[1]

B.R. Cullen, Viral and cellular messenger RNA targets of viral microRNAs, Nature 457 (2009) 421–425.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Yadlapalli, Y.M. Yamashita, Chromosome-specific nonrandom sister chromatid segregation during stem-cell division, Nature 498 (2013) 251–254.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

M.-S. Jeng, N.K. Ng, P.K.L. Ng, Feeding behaviour: hydrothermal vent crabs feast on sea “snow,” Nature 432 (2004) 969.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

T. Fukushima, A. Kosaka, Y. Ishimura, T. Yamamoto, T. Takigawa, N. Ishii, T. Aida, Molecular ordering of organic molten salts triggered by single-walled carbon nanotubes, Science 300 (2003) 2072–2074.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J.L. Bayuk, J. Healey, P. Rohmeyer, M.H. Sachs, J. Schmidt, J. Weiss, Cyber Security Policy Guidebook, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

Y. Wu, ed., Advanced Technology in Teaching - Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Conference on Teaching and Computational Science (WTCS 2009): Volume 2: Education, Psychology and Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

J. Quintero, V.M. Venkatasubramanian, A Real-Time Wide-Area Controller for Mitigating Small-Signal Instability, in: A.R. Messina (Ed.), Inter-Area Oscillations in Power Systems: A Nonlinear and Nonstationary Perspective, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2009: pp. 127–157.

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 Methods.

Blog post

[1]

R. Andrews, Genetic Study Reveals That There Are Four Species Of Giraffe, Not One, 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, Welfare Reform: Improving State Automated Systems Requires Coordinated Federal Effort, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2000.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R.T. Alexander, Can the analytical hierarchy process model be effectively applied in the prioritization of information assurance defense in-depth measures? - a quantitative study, Doctoral dissertation, Capella 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]

R.A. Medellín, D.J. Melnick, M.C. Pearl, Protect Our Bats, New York Times (2014) A23.

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	Methods
Abbreviation	Methods
ISSN (print)	1046-2023
Scope	General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology Molecular Biology