How to format your references using the Microbiological Research citation style

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

Banwart, S., 2011. Save our soils. Nature 474, 151–152.

A journal article with 2 authors

Sato, M., Sato, K., 2011. Degradation of paternal mitochondria by fertilization-triggered autophagy in C. elegans embryos. Science 334, 1141–1144.

A journal article with 3 authors

Roy, S., Hsiung, F., Kornberg, T.B., 2011. Specificity of Drosophila cytonemes for distinct signaling pathways. Science 332, 354–358.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Dale, J.K., Maroto, M., Dequeant, M.-L., Malapert, P., McGrew, M., Pourquie, O., 2003. Periodic notch inhibition by lunatic fringe underlies the chick segmentation clock. Nature 421, 275–278.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Cauvin, C., Escobar, F., Serradj, A., 2010. New Approaches in Thematic Cartography. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Craiger, P., Shenoi, S. (Eds.), 2007. Advances in Digital Forensics III: IFIP International Conference on Digital Forensics, National Centre for Forensic Science, Orlando, Florida, January 28-January 31, 2007, 1st ed, IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Schlingloff, B.-H., 2016. Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering, in: Liu, Z., Zhang, Z. (Eds.), Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems: First International School, SETSS 2014, Chongqing, China, September 8-13, 2014. Tutorial Lectures, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 256–289.

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 Microbiological Research.

Blog post

Luntz, S., 2016. Sea Level Rise Could “Save” Reefs From Global Warming [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1969. Use of Fixed-Price Contracts for the Procurement of Studies and Investigations of Research and Development Matters (No. 092660). 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

Cayo, P., 2017. A Shifting Bottleneck Procedure with Multiple Objectives in a Complex Manufacturing Environment (Doctoral dissertation). Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL.

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

Palmer, E., Otis, J., 2016. 4 Years After Hurricane Sandy, 2 Households Still Wait to Return Home. New York Times A19.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Banwart, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Banwart, 2011; Sato and Sato, 2011).

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

Two authors: (Sato and Sato, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Dale et al., 2003)

About the journal

Full journal title	Microbiological Research
Abbreviation	Microbiol. Res.
ISSN (print)	0944-5013
Scope	Microbiology