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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular and Cellular Probes. 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

[1]

S.R. Taylor, Why can’t planets be like stars?, Nature 430 (2004) 509.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

B. Collen, E. Nicholson, Conservation. Taking the measure of change, Science 346 (2014) 166–167.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

E. Blackstone, M. Morrison, M.B. Roth, H2S induces a suspended animation-like state in mice, Science 308 (2005) 518.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M.J. Siegert, R. Kwok, C. Mayer, B. Hubbard, Water exchange between the subglacial Lake Vostok and the overlying ice sheet, Nature 403 (2000) 643–646.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

S. Chatterji, P. Hedges, Loan Workouts and Debt for Equity Swaps, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2005.

An edited book

[1]

E. Stein, ed., The History of Theoretical, Material and Computational Mechanics - Mathematics Meets Mechanics and Engineering, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

A. Rangnekar, T.H. LaBean, Tile-Based DNA Nano-assemblies, in: J. Kjems, E. Ferapontova, K.V. Gothelf (Eds.), Nucleic Acid Nanotechnology, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014: pp. 71–92.

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 Probes.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Immunotherapy Drugs Could Herald New Era In Cancer Treatment, IFLScience (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/immunotherapy-drugs-could-herald-new-era-cancer-treatment/ (accessed October 30, 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Transportation Infrastructure: Highway Pavement Design Guide Is Outdated, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J.A. Grijalva, Exploring cultural finance: A phenomenological approach to comparative cultural perceptions of money in Mexico, Doctoral dissertation, Northcentral University, 2010.

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

[1]

B. Weiser, M. Schwirtz, Prison Guards Will Not Be Charged in an Inmate’s Death in 2015, Prosecutors Say, New York Times (2017) A15.

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	Molecular and Cellular Probes
Abbreviation	Mol. Cell. Probes
ISSN (print)	0890-8508
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology