How to format your references using the Molecular Biology of the Cell citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular Biology of the Cell. 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

Nee, S (2005). The great chain of being. Nature 435, 429.

A journal article with 2 authors

Dunham-Snary, KJ, and Ballinger, SW (2015). GENETICS. Mitochondrial-nuclear DNA mismatch matters. Science 349, 1449–1450.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bejan, A, Ziaei, S, and Lorente, S (2014). Evolution: why all plumes and jets evolve to round cross sections. Sci Rep 4, 4730.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Mashimo, T, Kaneko, T, Sakuma, T, Kobayashi, J, Kunihiro, Y, Voigt, B, Yamamoto, T, and Serikawa, T (2013). Efficient gene targeting by TAL effector nucleases coinjected with exonucleases in zygotes. Sci Rep 3, 1253.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Waye, JD, Aisenberg, J, and Rubin, PH (2013). Practical Colonoscopy, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

An edited book

Miao, D, Pedrycz, W, Ślȩzak, D, Peters, G, Hu, Q, and Wang, R (2014). Rough Sets and Knowledge Technology: 9th International Conference, RSKT 2014, Shanghai, China, October 24-26, 2014, Proceedings, Cham: Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Goczyła, K, Waloszek, W, Zawadzka, T, and Zawadzki, M (2008). Processing and Querying Description Logic Ontologies Using Cartographic Approach. In: Knowledge-Driven Computing: Knowledge Engineering and Intelligent Computations, ed. C Cotta, S Reich, R Schaefer, and A Ligęza, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 63–80.

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 Biology of the Cell.

Blog post

Andrew, E (2014). Why Do We Kiss? IFLScience. Available at: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-do-we-kiss/. 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

Government Accountability Office (2002). Space Station: Actions Under Way to Manage Cost, but Significant Challenges Remain, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Duncan, EA (2017). Environmental controls of black abalone body temperature determine risks of thermal stress and disease. Doctoral dissertation. California State University, Long Beach.

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

Feeney, K (2009). Fire Up the Grill. New York Times, NJ8.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Nee, 2005).
This sentence cites two references (Nee, 2005; Dunham-Snary and Ballinger, 2015).

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

Two authors: (Dunham-Snary and Ballinger, 2015)
Three or more authors: (Mashimo et al., 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular Biology of the Cell
Abbreviation	Mol. Biol. Cell
ISSN (print)	1059-1524
ISSN (online)	1939-4586
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology