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

Lieberman P (2013) Neuroscience. Synapses, language, and being human. Science 342:944–945

A journal article with 2 authors

Hegerl GC, Bindoff NL (2005) Ocean science. Warming the world’s oceans. Science 309:254–255

A journal article with 3 authors

Yamashiro H, Isomura N, Sakai K (2014) Bloom of the cyanobacterium Moorea bouillonii on the gorgonian coral Annella reticulata in Japan. Sci Rep 4:6032

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Do MTH, Kang SH, Xue T, et al (2009) Photon capture and signalling by melanopsin retinal ganglion cells. Nature 457:281–287

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bragg SM (2009) Controllership. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Scharfman HE, Buckmaster PS (2014) Issues in Clinical Epileptology: A View from the Bench. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A chapter in an edited book

Liu X, Li J, Zhou D, et al (2016) Preserving the d-Reachability When Anonymizing Social Networks. In: Cui B, Zhang N, Xu J, et al (eds) Web-Age Information Management: 17th International Conference, WAIM 2016, Nanchang, China, June 3-5, 2016, Proceedings, Part II. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 40–51

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

Andrew D (2016) Running Makes You Smarter – Here’s How. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/running-makes-you-smarter-heres-how/. 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 (2013) National Science Foundation: Steps Taken to Improve Contracting Practices, but Opportunities Exist to Do More. 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

Shirley A (2012) Connecting foster children with their siblings within a summer camp setting: A grant proposal. 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

Brantley B (2017) Deluded, Yet So Reasonable. New York Times C1

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