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

Gehrels T (2000) Brains, courage and integrity. Nature 404:335

A journal article with 2 authors

Tao FF, Salmeron M (2011) In situ studies of chemistry and structure of materials in reactive environments. Science 331:171–174

A journal article with 3 authors

Monthoux P, Pines D, Lonzarich GG (2007) Superconductivity without phonons. Nature 450:1177–1183

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Block BA, Jonsen ID, Jorgensen SJ, et al (2011) Tracking apex marine predator movements in a dynamic ocean. Nature 475:86–90

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

King AM (2011) Internal Control of Fixed Assets. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Carreiro MM, Song Y-C, Wu J (2008) Ecology, Planning, and Management of Urban Forests: International Perspectives. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Mao X, Hou F, Wu W (2015) Multi-Agent System Approach for Modeling and Supporting Software Crowdsourcing. In: Li W, Huhns MN, Tsai W-T, Wu W (eds) Crowdsourcing: Cloud-Based Software Development. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 73–89

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) 6 Surprising Downsides Of Being Extremely Intelligent. 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 (1974) Improvement Needed In Documenting Computer Systems. 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

Stuehling AL (2017) “We Speak ‘Hola’ In School”: A Case Study of Global Education in a Partial-Immersion Spanish Preschool. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University

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 (2016) Diverting, but No Need to Stop the Presses. 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