How to format your references using the Microbial Ecology citation style

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

May M (2013) Regenerative medicine: Rebuilding the backbone. Nature 503:S7-9

A journal article with 2 authors

Hochberg YV, Fehder DC (2015) ENTREPRENEURSHIP. Accelerators and ecosystems. Science 348:1202–1203

A journal article with 3 authors

Pierce JL, Meyer GA, Jull AJT (2004) Fire-induced erosion and millennial-scale climate change in northern ponderosa pine forests. Nature 432:87–90

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Nam M-S, Mézière C, Batail P, et al (2013) Superconducting fluctuations in organic molecular metals enhanced by Mott criticality. Sci Rep 3:3390

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Šolín P (2005) Partial Differential Equations and the Finite Element Method. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Hull E (2005) Requirements Engineering, Second Edition. Springer, London

A chapter in an edited book

Ganov S, Killmar C, Khurshid S, Perry DE (2009) Event Listener Analysis and Symbolic Execution for Testing GUI Applications. In: Breitman K, Cavalcanti A (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering: 11th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods ICFEM 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, December 9-12, 2009. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 69–87

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 Ecology.

Blog post

Davis J (2016) More Younger People In The UK Are Watching Planet Earth II Than The X Factor. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/more-younger-people-in-the-uk-are-watching-planet-earth-ii-than-the-x-factor/. 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 (1994) Federal Research: Additional Funds for Terminating the Super Collider Are Not Justified. 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

Aslanyan AL (2014) Psycho-educational group for family members of adults with a mental health diagnosis: A grant proposal. 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

Kelly C (2012) ‘Big Rich Texas’ Becomes an Unlikely Reality-TV Hit. New York Times A33B

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	Microbial Ecology
Abbreviation	Microb. Ecol.
ISSN (print)	0095-3628
ISSN (online)	1432-184X
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Soil Science Ecology