How to format your references using the Chinese Physics Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Chinese Physics 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

[1]

Gewin V 2004 Putting pen to paper Nature 432 418–9

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Berndt A and Deisseroth K 2015 OPTOGENETICS. Expanding the optogenetics toolkit Science 349 590–1

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Chalasani R, Gupta A and Vasudevan S 2013 Engineering new layered solids from exfoliated inorganics: a periodically alternating hydrotalcite-montmorillonite layered hybrid Sci. Rep. 3 3498

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Larkin R M, Alonso J M, Ecker J R and Chory J 2003 GUN4, a regulator of chlorophyll synthesis and intracellular signaling Science 299 902–6

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Drake P P and Fabozzi F J 2009 Foundations and Applications of the Time Value of Money (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Zambon G 2007 Beginning JSP, JSF, and Tomcat Web Development: From Novice to Professional ed M Sekler (Berkeley, CA: Apress)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Arthurs O J and Sebire N J 2015 Perinatal Imaging Keeling’s Fetal and Neonatal Pathology ed T Y Khong and R D G Malcomson (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 123–40

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 Chinese Physics Letters.

Blog post

[1]

Andrew E 2015 Intermittent Fasting Could be Beneficial to Health IFLScience

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office 1997 NASA: Interest Earned on Letter of Credit Funds (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Hayen C J 2017 Canine-Assisted Psychotherapy: Finding the Way Back to Our Animal Soul Doctoral dissertation (Carpinteria, CA: Pacifica Graduate Institute)

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

[1]

Qiu L 2017 Election Influence, Separate and Unequal New York Times A16

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	Chinese Physics Letters
Abbreviation	Chin. Physics Lett.
ISSN (print)	0256-307X
ISSN (online)	1741-3540
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy