How to format your references using the The ISME Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The ISME Journal. 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

Willyard C. Stem cells: bad seeds. Nature 2013; 498: S12-3.

A journal article with 2 authors

Green DR, Kroemer G. Cytoplasmic functions of the tumour suppressor p53. Nature 2009; 458: 1127–1130.

A journal article with 3 authors

Kelley AM, Michalet X, Weiss S. Chemical physics. Single-molecule spectroscopy comes of age. Science 2001; 292: 1671–1672.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Miles LA, Crespi GAN, Doughty L, Parker MW. Bapineuzumab captures the N-terminus of the Alzheimer’s disease amyloid-beta peptide in a helical conformation. Sci Rep 2013; 3: 1302.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Tschirhart M, Bielefeld W. Managing Nonprofit Organizations. 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., San Francisco.

An edited book

Defourny B, Terlaky T (eds). Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications: MOPTA, Bethlehem, PA, USA, August 2014 Selected Contributions, 1st ed. 2015. 2015. Springer International Publishing, Cham.

A chapter in an edited book

Cleophas TJ, Zwinderman AH. Loglinear Models for Assessing Incident Rates with Varying Incident Risks (12 Populations with Different Drink Consumption Patterns). In: Zwinderman AH (ed). Machine Learning in Medicine - Cookbook Three. 2014. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 35–38.

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 The ISME Journal.

Blog post

Andrew D. No, Enjoying A Gin And Tonic Doesn’t Mean You’re A Psychopath. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/no-enjoying-a-gin-and-tonic-doesnt-mean-youre-a-psychopath/. 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. Follow Through: Lessons Learned From Its Evaluation and Need To Improve Its Administration. 1975. 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

Davies GL. An analysis of Pat Metheny’s and Lyle Mays’s ‘Third Wind’: Arranging techniques and performance considerations. 2015. 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

Lyall S. Olympic Fears Rattle Athletes and Families. New York Times . 2014. , 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	The ISME Journal
Abbreviation	ISME J.
ISSN (print)	1751-7362
ISSN (online)	1751-7370
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Microbiology