How to format your references using the Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution citation style

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteDownload the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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
Dolgin, E., 2014. Therapeutics: Negative feedback. Nature 508, S10-1.
A journal article with 2 authors
Whittall, J.B., Hodges, S.A., 2007. Pollinator shifts drive increasingly long nectar spurs in columbine flowers. Nature 447, 706–709.
A journal article with 3 authors
Junge, W., Sielaff, H., Engelbrecht, S., 2009. Torque generation and elastic power transmission in the rotary F(O)F(1)-ATPase. Nature 459, 364–370.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
Poccia, N., Campi, G., Ricci, A., Caporale, A.S., Di Cola, E., Hawkins, T.A., Bianconi, A., 2014. Changes of statistical structural fluctuations unveils an early compacted degraded stage of PNS myelin. Sci. Rep. 4, 5430.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
Petrucelli, J.R., Peters, J.R., 2016. Preventing Fraud and Mismanagement in Government. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.
An edited book
Chen, S.-H., Wang, P.P., Kuo, T.-W. (Eds.), 2007. Computational Intelligence in Economics and Finance: Volume II. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
A chapter in an edited book
Goraş, L., Vornicu, I., Ungureanu, P., 2013. Topics on Cellular Neural Networks, in: Bianchini, M., Maggini, M., Jain, L.C. (Eds.), Handbook on Neural Information Processing, Intelligent Systems Reference Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 97–141.

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 Phylogenetics and Evolution.

Blog post
Andrew, E., 2014. DNA Strands Used To Create Origami Nanobots Inside Cockroaches [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dna-strands-used-create-origami-nanobots-inside-cockroaches/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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, 1986. ADP Acquisitions: Patent Automation Encountering Major Planning and Procurement Problems (No. IMTEC-86-19). 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
Tian, C.Y., 2010. Studies of equilibrium conditions in housing markets (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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
Kovaleski, S.F., 2013. Supervisors Of Gunman Were Told Of Issues. New York Times A10.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Dolgin, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Dolgin, 2014; Whittall and Hodges, 2007).

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

  • Two authors: (Whittall and Hodges, 2007)
  • Three or more authors: (Poccia et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal titleMolecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
AbbreviationMol. Phylogenet. Evol.
ISSN (print)1055-7903
ScopeEcology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Genetics
Molecular Biology

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