How to format your references using the Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. 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

Chin JW (2009) Journal club. A molecular biologist gets excited about making designer proteins in cells. Nature 457:239

A journal article with 2 authors

Richmond BG, Strait DS (2000) Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. Nature 404:382–385

A journal article with 3 authors

De Moraes CM, Mescher MC, Tumlinson JH (2001) Caterpillar-induced nocturnal plant volatiles repel conspecific females. Nature 410:577–580

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Gallo EM, Winslow MM, Canté-Barrett K, et al (2007) Calcineurin sets the bandwidth for discrimination of signals during thymocyte development. Nature 450:731–735

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Kang S (2012) Micro/Nano Replication. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ

An edited book

Žegarac Leskovar V (2013) Energy-Efficient Timber-Glass Houses. Springer, London

A chapter in an edited book

Weiner GJ (2014) Activation of NK Cell Responses and Immunotherapy of Cancer. In: Rosenblatt J, Podack ER, Barber GN, Ochoa A (eds) Advances in Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. Springer, New York, NY, pp 57–66

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 Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry.

Blog post

Davis J (2017) Researchers Create A Stable Organism Containing Synthetic DNA That Can Replicate Indefinitely. In: IFLScience. 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 (1995) Transportation Trust Funds. 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

Zhao L (2017) Modeling, Estimation and Approximation in Structured Models. Doctoral dissertation, University of Louisiana

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

Montague J (2017) For the Obscure, a Welcome Payday. New York Times B11

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	Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry
Abbreviation	Mol. Cell. Biochem.
ISSN (print)	0300-8177
ISSN (online)	1573-4919
Scope	Cell Biology Clinical Biochemistry Molecular Biology General Medicine