How to format your references using the Trends in Microbiology citation style

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

Abbott, A. (2001) WHO plans study of Gulf War fallout. Nature 413, 97

A journal article with 2 authors

Abraham, R.G. and van Den Bergh, S. (2001) The morphological evolution of galaxies. Science 293, 1273–1278

A journal article with 3 authors

Muir, G. et al. (2000) Species status of hybridizing oaks. Nature 405, 1016

A journal article with 3 or more authors

Barnosky, A.D. et al. (2011) Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471, 51–57

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

von Eye, A. and Mun, E.-Y. (2012) Log-Linear Modeling, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Inamuddin and Mohammad, A., eds. (2014) Green Chromatographic Techniques: Separation and Purification of Organic and Inorganic Analytes, Springer Netherlands

A chapter in an edited book

Noor, T.H. et al. (2014) Robust and Adaptive Credibility Model. In Trust Management in Cloud Services (Sheng, Q. Z. and Bouguettaya, A., eds), pp. 45–57, Springer International Publishing

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 Trends in Microbiology.

Blog post

Fang, J. (2015) Outer Envelope of Flu Virus Simulated for the First Time. IFLScience. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/outer-envelope-flu-virus-simulated-first-time/. [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 (1986) Data Processing: SBA Needs To Strengthen Management of Its Computer Systems, 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

Olsen, C.M. (2009) A violinist in a non-classical world: Sugizo’s use of violin in popular music. 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

Wagner, J. (2016) Bruce Limps Off, and the Mets CrumbleNew York Times, B13

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	Trends in Microbiology
Abbreviation	Trends Microbiol.
ISSN (print)	0966-842X
ISSN (online)	1878-4380
Scope	Microbiology Virology Infectious Diseases Microbiology (medical)