How to format your references using the Microbial Biotechnology citation style

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

Borhani, D.W. (2011) Comment on “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” Science 332: 1149; author reply 1149.

A journal article with 2 authors

Groisman, A. and Steinberg, V., V. (2000) Elastic turbulence in a polymer solution flow. Nature 405: 53–55.

A journal article with 3 authors

Okada, D., Ozawa, F., and Inokuchi, K. (2009) Input-specific spine entry of soma-derived Vesl-1S protein conforms to synaptic tagging. Science 324: 904–909.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

Harismendy, O., Notani, D., Song, X., Rahim, N.G., Tanasa, B., Heintzman, N., et al. (2011) 9p21 DNA variants associated with coronary artery disease impair interferon-γ signalling response. Nature 470: 264–268.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Firth-Cozens, J. and Harrison, J. (2010) How to Survive in Medicine, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Zhong, Z. ed. (2013) Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Engineering and Applications (IEA) 2012: Volume 2, London: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Haegele, M., Maufroy, C., Kraus, W., Siee, M., and Breuninger, J. (2015) Musculoskeletal Robots and Wearable Devices on the Basis of Cable-driven Actuators. In Soft Robotics: Transferring Theory to Application. Verl, A., Albu-Schäffer, A., Brock, O., and Raatz, A. (eds). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 42–53.

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 Microbial Biotechnology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2014) This Is What Sex Looks Like Inside An MRI Machine. 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 (1988) National Aero-Space Plane: A Technology Development and Demonstration Program To Build the X-30, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Wadhwa, P.H. (2015) Secure building automation system using Tesla protocol.

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

Buckley, C. (2017) Tycoon’s Claims Reverberate in China Despite Censorship and Thin Evidence. New York Times A9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Borhani, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Groisman and Steinberg, 2000; Borhani, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Groisman and Steinberg, 2000)
Three or more authors: (Harismendy et al., 2011)

About the journal

Full journal title	Microbial Biotechnology
Abbreviation	Microb. Biotechnol.
ISSN (online)	1751-7915
Scope	Biochemistry Biotechnology Bioengineering Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology