How to format your references using the Metabolic Engineering citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Metabolic Engineering. 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 reference managers.
BibTeX	BibTeX styles 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

Pollard, T.D., 2011. Cell biology. Formin tip tracking. Science 331, 39–41.

A journal article with 2 authors

Stebbins, C.E., Galán, J.E., 2001. Maintenance of an unfolded polypeptide by a cognate chaperone in bacterial type III secretion. Nature 414, 77–81.

A journal article with 3 authors

Mersch, D.P., Crespi, A., Keller, L., 2013. Tracking individuals shows spatial fidelity is a key regulator of ant social organization. Science 340, 1090–1093.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Perry, L., Sandweiss, D.H., Piperno, D.R., Rademaker, K., Malpass, M.A., Umire, A., de la Vera, P., 2006. Early maize agriculture and interzonal interaction in southern Peru. Nature 440, 76–79.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Sadati, N., Dumont, G.A., Hamed, K.A., Gruver, W.A., 2012. Hybrid Control and Motion Planning of Dynamical Legged Locomotion. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ.

An edited book

Dev, S.M., Yedla, S. (Eds.), 2015. Cities and Sustainability: Issues and Strategic Pathways, Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer India, New Delhi.

A chapter in an edited book

Libal, K.R., Harding, S., 2015. Community Practice, Fostering Participation, and Human Rights, in: Harding, S. (Ed.), Human Rights-Based Community Practice in the United States, SpringerBriefs in Rights-Based Approaches to Social Work. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp. 79–83.

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 Metabolic Engineering.

Blog post

Andrew, E., 2015. Bomb Sniffing Dogs Detect Prostate Cancer With More Than 95% Accuracy [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL (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, 1985. Educating Students at Gallaudet and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf: Who Are Served and What Are the Costs? (No. HRD-85-34). 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

Carver, A., 2017. From under the blanket (Doctoral dissertation). California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA.

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

Leland, J., 2017. After Prayer, Practicing Her Swing. New York Times MB2.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Pollard, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Pollard, 2011; Stebbins and Galán, 2001).

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

Two authors: (Stebbins and Galán, 2001)
Three or more authors: (Perry et al., 2006)

About the journal

Full journal title	Metabolic Engineering
Abbreviation	Metab. Eng.
ISSN (print)	1096-7176
Scope	Biotechnology Bioengineering Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology