How to format your references using the Molecular Brain citation style

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

1. Heine V V. Crystal structure. As weird as they come. Nature. 2000;403:836–7.

A journal article with 2 authors

1. Bottos A, Hynes NE. Cancer: Staying together on the road to metastasis. Nature. 2014;514:309–10.

A journal article with 3 authors

1. Wu B, Chen J, Singer RH. Background free imaging of single mRNAs in live cells using split fluorescent proteins. Sci Rep. 2014;4:3615.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

1. Stadler RH, Blank I, Varga N, Robert F, Hau J, Guy PA, et al. Acrylamide from Maillard reaction products. Nature. 2002;419:449–50.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

1. Voldman SH. ESD. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2006.

An edited book

1. Bühler P, Hartmann O, Marton J, Suzuki K, Widmann E, Zmeskal J, editors. EXA 2011: Proceedings of the International Conference on Exotic Atoms and Related Topics (EXA 2011) held in Vienna, Austria, September 5-9, 2011. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands; 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

1. Frank AU. Why Is Scale an Effective Descriptor for Data Quality? The Physical and Ontological Rationale for Imprecision and Level of Detail. In: Navratil G, editor. Research Trends in Geographic Information Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2009. p. 39–61.

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 Brain.

Blog post

1. Andrew E. New Candidate Brings us One Step Closer to an HIV Vaccine. IFLScience. IFLScience; 2015.

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. Student Enrollment and Attendance Reports in the Boston Public School System Are Substantially Accurate. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1976 Jul. Report No.: HRD-76-146.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

1. Alajmi H. Pre-Islamic Poetry and Speech Act Theory: Al-A`shá, Bishr ibn Abī Khāzim, and al-Hujayjah [Doctoral dissertation]. [Bloomington, IN]: Indiana 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. Schmidt MS. Mueller Inquiry Seeks Documents On Trump Firings. New York Times. 2017 Sep 20;A1.

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 Brain
Abbreviation	Mol. Brain
ISSN (online)	1756-6606
Scope	Molecular Biology Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience