What is it with biological journals that allow latex submissions but don't seem to know what latex actually is (let alone provide files for meeting their formatting requirements)? I'm looking for styles for Molecular Biology and Evolution; bibliography requirements are as below (note the weird format where first author is Surname, Initials while subsequent authors are Initials Surname).

I've downloaded several standard styles, but nothing is close to this. Can anyone help?

Konrad

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The 'Literature Cited' section must

* be arranged alphabetically by author(s) and then chronologically
* contain only works specifically cited in the text
* refer to manuscripts accepted for publication but which have not yet been published as "in press"
* not include manuscripts that have not formally been accepted for publication
* follow the guidelines for abbreviations of periodicals in The Council of Biology Editors Style Manual (6th ed., 1994) (url deleted)
* be formatted as in recent issues of the journal and as follows:


Journal articles:

Pensole, G., C. Gissi, C. Lanave, and C. Saccone. 1995. Glutamine synthetase gene evolution in bacteria. Mol. Biol. Evol.
12:189-197.

(>10 co-authors):

Wilson, R., R. Ainscough, K. Anderson et al. (53 co-authors). 1994. 2.2 Mb of contiguous nucleotide sequence from chromosome
III of C. elegans. Nature 368:32-38.

Books:

Ingram, V. M. 1963. The hemoglobins in genetics and evolution. Columbia University Press, New York.

Book chapters:

Hall, B. G. 1983. Evolution of new metabolic functions in laboratory organisms. Pp. 234-257 in M. Nei and R. K. Koehn, eds.
Evolution of genes and proteins. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Mass.

Do you mean that you have problem opening LaTeX files? If so try Kile. If I misunderstood, I'm sorry.

No, I have written a document in LaTeX and am trying to format it to meet the requirements for publication in a rather un-LaTeX-friendly journal.

Again how about Kile. It lets you format and convert to variety of formats

I suggest to contact a TUG (TeX User Group).

I'm sure you could find an answer to your questions there.

I write in scientific journals but I've never had such problems so I can't help you

Thanks for the responses - I'll look into Kile...

You need to get hold of <b>makebst</> which, once you follow the README, will guide you step-by-step thru making your own bibtex style file.

you can then copy the MyBibTexStyle.bst to the same directory where you store your LaTex files and enter
\bibliographystyle{MyBibTexStyle}


Here's A Link

And some another good reference

Good luck!

Ben

Hi,

I realize this thread started quite some time ago, but I've got a manuscript for MBE and I am running into the same problem as the original poster.

I tried using makebst, but I can't seem to make a bst where citations have the format of authors names for 3 or less authors and first author + et al for more than three authors.

The only option that seemed related to this was
%>>NUMBER OF AUTHORS:
x10,x0,%: Maximum of 10 authors
m3,%: Minimum of 3 authors
%

but this didn't seem to solve the problem

so.

Does anyone (a) know the solution for this problem using makebst or (b) have a style file that works for MBE?

Please let me know.

Mike

Sorry, I should have posted here when I eventually solved the problem (which I did by googling for "latex" and "Molecular Biology and Evolution", then emailing the two hits I got - no need to duplicate work for something you know has already been done!)

The bst file I eventually used (thanks to Jiaye Yu, who created this using makebst) is here: http://cbio.uct.ac.za/Members/konrad/mbestyle/

This works fine in conjunction with natbib. (Or did in 2005 - no guarrantees that MBE won't have changed their requirements since...)

Konrad