How to format your references using the Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution citation style

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

Schroers, J., 2014. Condensed-matter physics: Glasses made from pure metals. Nature 512, 142–143.

A journal article with 2 authors

Frey, B.J., Dueck, D., 2007. Clustering by passing messages between data points. Science 315, 972–976.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bradley, P., Misura, K.M.S., Baker, D., 2005. Toward high-resolution de novo structure prediction for small proteins. Science 309, 1868–1871.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Szakonyi, G., Guthridge, J.M., Li, D., Young, K., Holers, V.M., Chen, X.S., 2001. Structure of complement receptor 2 in complex with its C3d ligand. Science 292, 1725–1728.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Paret, D., 2012. Flexray and its Applications. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Sintchenko, V. (Ed.), 2010. Infectious Disease Informatics. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Harpe, P., Hegt, H., van Roermund, A., 2010. Design of a Sub-Binary Variable-Radix DAC, in: Hegt, H., Harpe, P. (Eds.), Smart AD and DA Conversion. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp. 41–55.

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 Phylogenetics and Evolution.

Blog post

Davis, J., 2017. Modern Humans And Neanderthals May Have Been Swapping STIs [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, 2009. Information Technology: Social Security Administration’s Data Exchanges Support Current Programs, but Better Planning Is Needed to Meet Future Demands (No. GAO-09-966). 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

Flynn, M.J., 2013. Lifeguard employability skills (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

Greenhouse, L., 2007. Free-Speech Case Divides Bush and Religious Right. New York Times A22.

In-text citations

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

This sentence cites one reference (Schroers, 2014).
This sentence cites two references (Frey and Dueck, 2007; Schroers, 2014).

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

Two authors: (Frey and Dueck, 2007)
Three or more authors: (Szakonyi et al., 2001)

About the journal

Full journal title	Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution
Abbreviation	Mol. Phylogenet. Evol.
ISSN (print)	1055-7903
Scope	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Genetics Molecular Biology