How to format your references using the MethodsX citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for MethodsX. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

[1]

G.J. Nabel, Challenges and opportunities for development of an AIDS vaccine, Nature 410 (2001) 1002–1007.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

D. Ringe, G.A. Petsko, Biochemistry. How enzymes work, Science 320 (2008) 1428–1429.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

G. Tanaka, C. Urabe, K. Aihara, Random and targeted interventions for epidemic control in metapopulation models, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 5522.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

C. Narteau, S. Byrdina, P. Shebalin, D. Schorlemmer, Common dependence on stress for the two fundamental laws of statistical seismology, Nature 462 (2009) 642–645.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A.F.D. Mackenzie, Places of Possibility, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

A. Dillmann, G. Heller, E. Krämer, C. Wagner, C. Breitsamter, eds., New Results in Numerical and Experimental Fluid Mechanics X: Contributions to the 19th STAB/DGLR Symposium Munich, Germany, 2014, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. Fiore, M. Devesas Campos, The Algebra of Directed Acyclic Graphs, in: B. Coecke, L. Ong, P. Panangaden (Eds.), Computation, Logic, Games, and Quantum Foundations. The Many Facets of Samson Abramsky: Essays Dedicated to Samson Abramsky on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013: pp. 37–51.

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 MethodsX.

Blog post

[1]

R. Andrews, Cats Are Living Longer And Healthier Lives Than Ever Before, IFLScience (2016).

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Air Traffic Control: Complete and Enforced Architecture Needed for FAA Systems Modernization, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J. Dias, Factors associated with poor oral health among older adults, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2014.

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

[1]

S. Kishkovsky, Taking Manhattan By Bike, the Russian Way, New York Times (2011) TR2.

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	MethodsX
Abbreviation	MethodsX
ISSN (print)	2215-0161
Scope