How to format your references using the ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for ACS Medicinal Chemistry 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 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)

Carlson, D. A Lesson in Sharing. Nature 2011, 469 (7330), 293.

A journal article with 2 authors

(1)

Coffin, J. M.; Stoye, J. P. Virology. A New Virus for Old Diseases? Science 2009, 326 (5952), 530–531.

A journal article with 3 authors

(1)

Wang, Y.; Duan, Z.; Fan, D. An Ion Diffusion Method for Visualising a Solid-like Water Nanofilm. Sci. Rep. 2013, 3, 3505.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

(1)

Aleman, A.; F de Haan, E. H.; Castner, S. A.; Williams, G. V.; Goldman-Rakic, P. S. Antipsychotics and Working Memory in Schizophrenia. Science 2000, 289 (5476), 56b–58b.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

(1)

Perera, A. H.; Buse, L. J. Ecology of Wildfire Residuals in Boreal Forests; John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester, UK, 2014.

An edited book

(1)

Howler Monkeys: Adaptive Radiation, Systematics, and Morphology; Kowalewski, M. M., Garber, P. A., Cortés-Ortiz, L., Urbani, B., Youlatos, D., Eds.; Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects; Springer: New York, NY, 2015.

A chapter in an edited book

(1)

Surján, P. R.; Szabados, Á. Perturbative Approximations to Avoid Matrix Diagonalization. In Linear-Scaling Techniques in Computational Chemistry and Physics: Methods and Applications; Zalesny, R., Papadopoulos, M. G., Mezey, P. G., Leszczynski, J., Eds.; Springer Netherlands: Dordrecht, 2011; pp 83–95.

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 Medicinal Chemistry Letters.

Blog post

(1)

Hamilton, K. How Dogs Could Make Children Better Readers. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/how-dogs-could-make-children-better-readers/ (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. Accessible Communications: FCC Should Evaluate the Effectiveness of Its Public Outreach Efforts; GAO-15-574; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2015.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

(1)

Goldberg, A. L. The Seriously Ill Patient’s Broken Care Continuum: One Community’s Action Response. Doctoral dissertation, Capella University, Minneapolis, MN, 2017.

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)

Bosman, J.; Harmon, A. Love of Music Drew Victims To a Fatal Trap. New York Times. October 4, 2017, p A1.

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 Medicinal Chemistry Letters
Abbreviation	ACS Med. Chem. Lett.
ISSN (online)	1948-5875
Scope