How to format your references using the Molecular Biology Reports citation style

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

Singer M (2004) Education. The evolution of postdocs. Science 306:232

A journal article with 2 authors

Berger A, Loutre MF (2002) Climate. An exceptionally long interglacial ahead? Science 297:1287–1288

A journal article with 3 authors

Meissner M, Schlüter D, Soldati D (2002) Role of Toxoplasma gondii myosin A in powering parasite gliding and host cell invasion. Science 298:837–840

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Zhang B, Zhang Y, Wang Z, et al (2014) Candidate quantum spin liquid due to dimensional reduction of a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Sci Rep 4:6451

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zito R (2011) Electrochemical Water Processing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Mehlhorn H (2012) Arthropods as Vectors of Emerging Diseases. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Lützen J (2013) The Interaction of Physics, Mechanics and Mathematics in Joseph Liouville’s Research. In: Barbin E, Pisano R (eds) The Dialectic Relation Between Physics and Mathematics in the XIXth Century. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 79–96

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 Reports.

Blog post

Andrew D (2016) Astronomers Just Discovered One Of The Most Massive Objects In The Universe Hiding Behind The Milky Way. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1977) Problems in the Federal Funding of School Bus Driver Training Programs. 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

Selph CS (2015) Origins of Music Programs in Liberal Arts Institutions: The Story of Three Florida Catholic Universities. Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida

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

Brantley B (2017) Songs Say What Words Can’t. New York Times C1

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 Biology Reports
Abbreviation	Mol. Biol. Rep.
ISSN (print)	0301-4851
ISSN (online)	1573-4978
Scope	Genetics Molecular Biology General Medicine