How to format your references using the Molecular Astrophysics citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular Astrophysics. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Teske, A., 2010. Oceans. Cryptic links in the ocean. Science 330, 1326–1327.

A journal article with 2 authors

García-Bellido, D.C., Collins, D.H., 2004. Moulting arthropod caught in the act. Nature 429, 40.

A journal article with 3 authors

Scaillet, B., Pichavant, M., Cioni, R., 2008. Upward migration of Vesuvius magma chamber over the past 20,000 years. Nature 455, 216–219.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Snodgrass, C., Tubiana, C., Vincent, J.-B., Sierks, H., Hviid, S., Moissl, R., Boehnhardt, H., Barbieri, C., Koschny, D., Lamy, P., Rickman, H., Rodrigo, R., Carry, B., Lowry, S.C., Laird, R.J.M., Weissman, P.R., Fitzsimmons, A., Marchi, S., OSIRIS team, 2010. A collision in 2009 as the origin of the debris trail of asteroid P/2010 A2. Nature 467, 814–816.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

McBain, G.D., 2012. Theory of Lift. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Bailey, A., 2014. Hume’s Critique of Religion: “Sick Men’s Dreams,” The New Synthese Historical Library. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht.

A chapter in an edited book

Chien, C.-W., Chen, S.-J., Chen, J.-L., 2013. Designing “Hometown Feeling” Into Products, in: Rau, P.L.P. (Ed.), Cross-Cultural Design. Methods, Practice, and Case Studies: 5th International Conference, CCD 2013, Held as Part of HCI International 2013, Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 21-26, 2013, Proceedings, Part I, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 41–50.

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 Astrophysics.

Blog post

Carpineti, A., 2017. Monkey Caught Trying To Have Sex With Deer [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/monkey-caught-trying-to-have-sex-with-deer/ (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, 1997. Air Traffic Control: Immature Software Acquisition Processes Increase FAA System Acquisition Risks (No. AIMD-97-47). 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

Mitchell, S.F., 2009. Life-review therapy: A prevention program for the elderly who are experiencing life transitions. A grant proposal (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

Turkewitz, J., Pérez-Peña, R., Healy, J., 2017. Deluged and Weary, Texas Braces for Years of Recovery. New York Times A1.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Teske, 2010).
This sentence cites two references (García-Bellido and Collins, 2004; Teske, 2010).

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

Two authors: (García-Bellido and Collins, 2004)
Three or more authors: (Snodgrass et al., 2010)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular Astrophysics
ISSN (print)	2405-6758
Scope

Research and Writing Guides