How to format your references using the Molecular and Cellular Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB). 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

Grayson M. 2011. Medical research masterclass. Nature 478:S1.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kobayashi T, Hasui K. 2014. Efficient immunization strategies to prevent financial contagion. Sci Rep 4:3834.

A journal article with 3 authors

Sale JE, Patel KJ, Batista FD. 2013. Retrospective. Michael Neuberger (1953-2013). Science 342:1335.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Turner M, Golovko VB, Vaughan OPH, Abdulkin P, Berenguer-Murcia A, Tikhov MS, Johnson BFG, Lambert RM. 2008. Selective oxidation with dioxygen by gold nanoparticle catalysts derived from 55-atom clusters. Nature 454:981–983.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bradley RL Jr. 2011. Edison to Enron. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

González-Prida Díaz V. 2014. After–sales Service of Engineering Industrial Assets: A Reference Framework for Warranty Management. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Aldana R. 2014. Immigration Federalism and Rights, p. 61–92. In Baglay, S, Nakache, D (eds.), Immigration Regulation in Federal States: Challenges and Responses in Comparative Perspective. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

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 Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Blog post

Davis J. 2016. Our Ancestors Were Breeding With At Least Four, But Potentially More Species Of Other Hominins. IFLScience. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/our-ancestors-were-breeding-with-at-least-four-but-potentially-more-species-of-other-hominins/. Retrieved 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. 2006. Financial Management Systems: Lack of Disciplined Process Puts Effective Implementation of Treasury’s Governmentwide Financial Report System at Risk. GAO-06-413. 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

Katz RL. 2014. Graduate nursing students’ perceptions regarding caring for patients with HIV. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

McKINLEY JC Jr. 2017. Witness Lays Out Events Ending in Brazen Killing. New York Times.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in parentheses:

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	Molecular and Cellular Biology
Abbreviation	Mol. Cell. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0270-7306
ISSN (online)	1098-5549
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology