How to format your references using the Microbial Genomics citation style

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

May M. Drug development: Time for teamwork. Nature 2014;509:S4-5.

A journal article with 2 authors

Koelle K, Rasmussen DA. Influenza: Prediction is worth a shot. Nature 2014;507:47–48.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yazdanbakhsh M, Kremsner PG, van Ree R. Allergy, parasites, and the hygiene hypothesis. Science 2002;296:490–494.

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Walborn SP, Souto Ribeiro PH, Davidovich L, Mintert F, Buchleitner A. Experimental determination of entanglement with a single measurement. Nature 2006;440:1022–1024.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Labuszewski JW, Nyhoff JE, Co R, Peterson PE. The CME Group Risk Management Handbook. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2010.

An edited book

Lin Z, Wang J (eds). Low-cost Nanomaterials: Toward Greener and More Efficient Energy Applications. London: Springer; 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

Chantara W, Ho Y-S. Object Searching with Combination of Template Matching. In: Ho Y-S, Sang J, Ro YM, Kim J, Wu F (editors). Advances in Multimedia Information Processing -- PCM 2015: 16th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, Gwangju, South Korea, September 16-18, 2015, Proceedings, Part I. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2015. pp. 32–41.

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 Genomics.

Blog post

Fang J. Extremely Long Solar Filament Creates a Big Frown on the Sun. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/extremely-long-solar-filament-creates-big-frown-sun/ (2015, accessed 30 October 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. GSEs: Implications of Removing State and Local Tax Exemption. T-GGD-94-182; Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 14 July 1994.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Stahlhut CW. Aerodynamic design optimization of proprotors for convertible-rotor concepts. Doctoral Dissertation; University of Maryland, College Park; 2012.

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

Williams J. Hamilton Minus Music. New York Times, 26 May 2017, p. BR4.

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 Genomics
Abbreviation	Microb. Genom.
ISSN (online)	2057-5858
Scope

Research and Writing Guides