How to format your references using the Molecular Data Science citation style

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

J. Primack, Astronomy. Hidden growth of supermassive black holes in galaxy mergers, Science. 328 (2010) 576–578.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Rakoff-Nahoum, R. Medzhitov, Regulation of spontaneous intestinal tumorigenesis through the adaptor protein MyD88, Science. 317 (2007) 124–127.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

K. Shatzkes, B. Teferedegne, H. Murata, A simple, inexpensive method for preparing cell lysates suitable for downstream reverse transcription quantitative PCR, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 4659.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

M. Rembold, F. Loosli, R.J. Adams, J. Wittbrodt, Individual cell migration serves as the driving force for optic vesicle evagination, Science. 313 (2006) 1130–1134.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

J. Verdu, Oxidative Ageing of Polymers, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2012.

An edited book

[1]

A. Abraham, S. Kovalev, V. Tarassov, V. Snášel, eds., Proceedings of the First International Scientific Conference “Intelligent Information Technologies for Industry” (IITI’16): Volume 1, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

P. Poizat, J.-C. Royer, G. Salaün, Bounded Analysis and Decomposition for Behavioural Descriptions of Components, in: R. Gorrieri, H. Wehrheim (Eds.), Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems: 8th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, FMOODS 2006, Bologna, Italy, June 14-16, 2006. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006: pp. 33–47.

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 Data Science.

Blog post

[1]

T. Hale, Forget Lab-Grown Meat, Eating Insects Is Best For The Planet, IFLScience. (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/forget-labgrown-meat-eating-insects-is-best-for-the-planet/ (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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Aviation Safety: Better Data and Targeted FAA Efforts Needed to Identify and Address Safety Issues of Small Air Cargo Carriers, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2009.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

M.J. Coleman, Surface accuracy analysis and mathematical modeling of deployable large aperture elastic antenna reflectors, Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, 2010.

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]

M. Pilon, A.W. Lehren, A Scandal Leaves Its Mark, New York Times. (2013) D1.

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 Data Science
ISSN (print)	2590-0633
Scope

Research and Writing Guides