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

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACS Chemical Biology. 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 references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles 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)

Manabe, T. Does BDNF Have Pre- or Postsynaptic Targets? Science 2002, 295 (5560), 1651–1653.

A journal article with 2 authors

(1)

Luo, Z.-X.; Wible, J. R. A Late Jurassic Digging Mammal and Early Mammalian Diversification. Science 2005, 308 (5718), 103–107.

A journal article with 3 authors

(1)

Harrington, J.; Palethorpe, S.; Watson, C. I. Does the Queen Speak the Queen’s English? Nature 2000, 408 (6815), 927–928.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

(1)

Anest, V.; Hanson, J. L.; Cogswell, P. C.; Steinbrecher, K. A.; Strahl, B. D.; Baldwin, A. S. A Nucleosomal Function for IkappaB Kinase-Alpha in NF-KappaB-Dependent Gene Expression. Nature 2003, 423 (6940), 659–663.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

(1)

Pétrowski, A.; Ben-Hamida, S. Evolutionary Algorithms; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, NJ, 2017.

An edited book

(1)

New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies, Volume 2; Rocha, Á., Correia, A. M., Tan, F. B., Stroetmann, K. A., Eds.; Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2014; Vol. 276.

A chapter in an edited book

(1)

Nandi, S.; Ganguly, N. Resource Constrained Randomized Coverage Strategies for Unstructured Networks. In Propagation Phenomena in Real World Networks; Król, D., Fay, D., Gabryś, B., Eds.; Intelligent Systems Reference Library; Springer International Publishing: Cham, 2015; pp 107–134.

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 ACS Chemical Biology.

Blog post

(1)

Luntz, S. Ebola Vaccine Found To Be 100 Percent Effective In Trial. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/ebola-vaccine-found-to-be-100-percent-effective-in-trial/ (accessed 2018-10-30).

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. Detroit City Airport; RCED-92-169R; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

(1)

Douglas, L. Thermogravimetric and Raman Investigations on the Mechanism of Decomposition of Lead Compounds on Tungsten Surfaces. Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL, 2014.

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)

Hodara, S. Depicting Envy, ‘the Most Corrosive of the Sins.’ New York Times. August 2, 2015, p WE8.

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	ACS Chemical Biology
Abbreviation	ACS Chem. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1554-8929
ISSN (online)	1554-8937
Scope	Biochemistry Molecular Medicine General Medicine