How to format your references using the Microbial Biotechnology citation style

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

Offerman, S.E. (2004) Materials science. Microstructures in 4D. Science 305: 190–191.

A journal article with 2 authors

Engelberg-Kulka, H. and Hazan, R. (2003) Microbiology. Cannibals defy starvation and avoid sporulation. Science 301: 467–468.

A journal article with 3 authors

Katz, R.F., Spiegelman, M., and Holtzman, B. (2006) The dynamics of melt and shear localization in partially molten aggregates. Nature 442: 676–679.

A journal article with 8 or more authors

McGinty, R.K., Kim, J., Chatterjee, C., Roeder, R.G., and Muir, T.W. (2008) Chemically ubiquitylated histone H2B stimulates hDot1L-mediated intranucleosomal methylation. Nature 453: 812–816.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Coombs, W.T. and Holladay, S.J. (2011) Managing Corporate Social Responsibility, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

An edited book

Evans, H.M. and Burt, T.P. eds. (2016) The Collegiate Way: University Education in a Collegiate Context, Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

A chapter in an edited book

Chaouachi, M., Jraidi, I., and Frasson, C. (2011) Modeling Mental Workload Using EEG Features for Intelligent Systems. In User Modeling, Adaption and Personalization: 19th International Conference, UMAP 2011, Girona, Spain, July 11-15, 2011. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Konstan, J.A., Conejo, R., Marzo, J.L., and Oliver, N. (eds). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 50–61.

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 Microbial Biotechnology.

Blog post

Hamilton, K. (2016) Small Tropical Islands Could Become The World’s First 100% Renewable Nations. IFLScience.

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 (2007) Emergency Management: Status of School Districts’ Planning and Preparedness, Washington, DC: 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

Rhoads, E.P. (2006) Knowledge management practices in U.S. federal agencies: The catalyst for E-Government transformation.

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) Mets Enter Off-Season With One Big Question and Many Decisions. New York Times B9.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Offerman, 2004).
This sentence cites two references (Engelberg-Kulka and Hazan, 2003; Offerman, 2004).

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

Two authors: (Engelberg-Kulka and Hazan, 2003)
Three or more authors: (McGinty et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	Microbial Biotechnology
Abbreviation	Microb. Biotechnol.
ISSN (online)	1751-7915
Scope	Biochemistry Biotechnology Bioengineering Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology