How to format your references using the Chemical Biology Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Chemical Biology Letters. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

R. Mejia. Taking the industry road. Nature 2008, 453 (7198), 1138–1139.

A journal article with 2 authors

J. Hwang, E.R.M. Druffel. Lipid-like material as the source of the uncharacterized organic carbon in the ocean? Science 2003, 299 (5608), 881–884.

A journal article with 3 authors

F. Yu, J. Ma, S. Han. Adsorption of tetracycline from aqueous solutions onto multi-walled carbon nanotubes with different oxygen contents. Sci. Rep. 2014, 4, 5326.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

B.W. Brook, J.J. O’Grady, A.P. Chapman, et al. Predictive accuracy of population viability analysis in conservation biology. Nature 2000, 404 (6776), 385–387.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

H. Vorbrüggen. Silicon-Mediated Transformations of Functional Groups; Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG, 2005.

An edited book

User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization: 23rd International Conference, UMAP 2015, Dublin, Ireland, June 29 -- July 3, 2015. Proceedings; Ricci, F., Bontcheva, K., Conlan, O., Lawless, S., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2015; Vol. 9146.

A chapter in an edited book

B. Elias, M. Sester. Incorporating Landmarks with Quality Measures in Routing Procedures. In Geographic Information Science: 4th International Conference, GIScience 2006, Münster, Germany, September 20-23, 2006. Proceedings; Raubal, M., Miller, H. J., Frank, A. U., Goodchild, M. F., Eds.; Hutchison, D., Kanade, T., Kittler, J., Kleinberg, J. M., Mattern, F., Mitchell, J. C., Naor, M., Nierstrasz, O., Pandu Rangan, C., Steffen, B., et al., Series Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006; pp 65–80.

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 Chemical Biology Letters.

Blog post

E. Andrew. Stranded Leatherback Returned To The Ocean https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/stranded-leatherback-returned-ocean/ (accessed Oct 30, 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. Federal Agencies’ Contracting for Research and Development in the Private, Profitmaking Sector; PSAD-77-66; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1977.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

J. Liggins. Self-concept education as a motivator of life effectiveness. Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, 2012.

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

S.M. Nir, J. Barron. Relief and Trepidation as Ride-Hailing Services Become Legal Across New York. New York Times. July 4, 2017, p A18.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Chemical Biology Letters
ISSN (print)	2347-9825
Scope