How to format your references using the Molecular Ecology citation style

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

Doncaster, C. P. (2006). Comment on “On the regulation of populations of mammals, birds, fish, and insects” III. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5764), 1100; author reply 1100.

A journal article with 2 authors

Wyithe, J. S. B., & Loeb, A. (2006). Suppression of dwarf galaxy formation by cosmic reionization. Nature, 441(7091), 322–324.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mookherjee, M., Stixrude, L., & Karki, B. (2008). Hydrous silicate melt at high pressure. Nature, 452(7190), 983–986.

A journal article with 21 or more authors

Burg, T. P., Godin, M., Knudsen, S. M., Shen, W., Carlson, G., Foster, J. S., Babcock, K., & Manalis, S. R. (2007). Weighing of biomolecules, single cells and single nanoparticles in fluid. Nature, 446(7139), 1066–1069.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Paultre, P. (2013). Dynamics of Structures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Mason, G., Penkov, I., & Wolf, J. A. (Eds.). (2014). Developments and Retrospectives in Lie Theory: Geometric and Analytic Methods (Vol. 37). Springer International Publishing.

A chapter in an edited book

Wilding, J. P. H. (2008). Sibutramine. In J. P. H. Wilding (Ed.), Pharmacotherapy of Obesity (pp. 59–68). Birkhäuser.

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 Ecology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015, October 15). Our Fossil Find Suggests Humans Spread To Asia Way Before They Got To Europe. IFLScience; IFLScience.

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). NASA: Projects Need More Disciplined Oversight and Management to Address Key Challenges (GAO-09-436T). U.S. Government Printing Office.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Green, J. T. (2010). The relationship between technology support and extent of technology integration into college-level foreign language curricula [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

Peters, J. W. (2017, June 11). A Conspiracy Theorist, His False Comey Tweet And a Runaway Story. New York Times, A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Doncaster, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Doncaster, 2006; Wyithe & Loeb, 2006).

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

Two authors: (Wyithe & Loeb, 2006)
Three or more authors: (Burg et al., 2007)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular Ecology
Abbreviation	Mol. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0962-1083
ISSN (online)	1365-294X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Genetics