How to format your references using the Molecular Breeding citation style

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

McKinney JC (2012) Astronomy. Probing black hole gravity. Science 337:916–917

A journal article with 2 authors

Heath RJ, Rock CO (2000) A triclosan-resistant bacterial enzyme. Nature 406:145–146

A journal article with 3 authors

Manabe M, Barrett PM, Isaji S (2000) Palaeontology. A refugium for relics? Nature 404:953

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Long S, Perniola L, Cagli C, et al (2013) Voltage and power-controlled regimes in the progressive unipolar RESET transition of HfO₂-based RRAM. Sci Rep 3:2929

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Zigangirov KS (2004) Theory of Code Division Multiple Access Communication. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Lin F, Patel Z (eds) (2014) ENT Board Prep: High Yield Review for the Otolaryngology In-service and Board Exams. Springer, New York, NY

A chapter in an edited book

Liu H, Silva EA, Wang Q (2015) The Foundation for Agent-Based Modelling: Empirical Evidence of Creative Industries’ Interactions with Urban Land Use in Nanjing. In: Silva EA, Wang Q (eds) Creative Industries and Urban Spatial Structure: Agent-based Modelling of the Dynamics in Nanjing. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 53–100

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 Breeding.

Blog post

Hamilton K (2014) A Man Took This Photograph Of Birds, And Turned Their Positions Into Musical Notes. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/turning-birds-music/. 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 (2009) Aviation Security: Preliminary Observations on TSA’s Progress and Challenges in Meeting the Statutory Mandate for Screening Air Cargo on Passenger Aircraft. 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

Pulido BB (2015) Homes as grounding counterspaces: Mexicana undocumented students utilizing mother-daughter pedagogies of resistance to succeed in higher education. 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

Kelly TW (1975) Encounter: When Fantasy Becomes Fact. New York Times Travel and Resorts373

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (McKinney 2012).
This sentence cites two references (Heath and Rock 2000; McKinney 2012).

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

Two authors: (Heath and Rock 2000)
Three or more authors: (Long et al. 2013)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular Breeding
Abbreviation	Mol. Breed.
ISSN (print)	1380-3743
ISSN (online)	1572-9788
Scope	Agronomy and Crop Science Plant Science Biotechnology Genetics Molecular Biology