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]

M.M. Waldrop, Physics meets cancer: The disruptor, Nature. 474 (2011) 20–22.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

M. Goedert, Y. Cheng, Parkinson’s disease: Crystals of a toxic core, Nature. 525 (2015) 458–459.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.L. Atwood, L.J. Barbour, A. Jerga, Storage of methane and freon by interstitial van der Waals confinement, Science. 296 (2002) 2367–2369.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

E.C. Stone, A.C. Cummings, F.B. McDonald, B.C. Heikkila, N. Lal, W.R. Webber, Voyager 1 explores the termination shock region and the heliosheath beyond, Science. 309 (2005) 2017–2020.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

M. Morris, Concise Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 2011.

An edited book

[1]

G. Doherty, A. Blandford, eds., Interactive Systems. Design, Specification, and Verification: 13th International Workshop, DSVIS 2006, Dublin, Ireland, July 26-28, 2006. Revised Papers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

L. Vazquez, J.M. Miranda, E. Garfias, D. Dyolotzin, Fabrication and Characterization of Niobium-Aluminum Composites: Effect of Sintering Temperature, in: T. Sano, T.S. Srivatsan (Eds.), Advanced Composites for Aerospace, Marine, and Land Applications II, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 39–52.

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]

K. Hamilton, This New Treatment Could Make Pancreatic Cancer A Manageable Disease, IFLScience. (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/this-new-treatment-could-make-pancreatic-cancer-a-manageable-disease/ (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, Transition From School to Work: States Are Developing New Strategies to Prepare Students for Jobs, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1993.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

N.A. Sachdev, An Evaluation of the District of Columbia Summer Youth Employment Program, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 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

[1]

G.F. Kennan, OCT. 28, 1992: No Party Toppled The Soviets, New York Times. (2010) F6.

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

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