How to format your references using the Microbial Ecology citation style

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

Mustelin T (2006) Immunology. Restless T cells sniff and go. Science 313:1902–1903

A journal article with 2 authors

Fragoso G, Spencer T (2008) Physiographic control on the development of Spartina marshes. Science 322:1064

A journal article with 3 authors

Saitou M, Barton SC, Surani MA (2002) A molecular programme for the specification of germ cell fate in mice. Nature 418:293–300

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Li N, Chen Y, Zhang Y-M, et al (2014) Polysaccharide-gold nanocluster supramolecular conjugates as a versatile platform for the targeted delivery of anticancer drugs. Sci Rep 4:4164

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Allen DS (2012) Why Plato Wrote. Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford, UK

An edited book

Miller RL, Del Castillo CE, Mckee BA (2005) Remote Sensing of Coastal Aquatic Environments: Technologies, Techniques and Applications. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Burckhardt S (2015) Consistency in Distributed Systems. In: Meyer B, Nordio M (eds) Software Engineering: International Summer Schools, LASER 2013-2014, Elba, Italy, Revised Tutorial Lectures. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 84–120

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 Ecology.

Blog post

Hale T (2016) Hurricane Matthew Unearthed These Hidden Civil War Cannonballs In South Carolina. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/environment/hurricane-matthew-unearthed-these-hidden-civil-war-cannonballs-in-south-carolina/. Accessed 30 Oct 2018

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 (1989) Aviation Safety: Facility Ranking of Controller Survey Responses. 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

Dinh H (2013) A study of cell-based genetic algorithms with applications to neural networks. Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach

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

Davey M (2012) Limits on Unions Pass in Michigan, Once a Mainstay. New York Times A1

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	Microbial Ecology
Abbreviation	Microb. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0095-3628
ISSN (online)	1432-184X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Soil Science Ecology