How to format your references using the Cancer Letters citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Cancer 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	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]

O.C. Farokhzad, Nanotechnology: Platelet mimicry, Nature. 526 (2015) 47–48.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

J.H. Geisler, J.M. Theodor, Hippopotamus and whale phylogeny, Nature. 458 (2009) E1-4; discussion E5.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

T. Imaizumi, S.A. Kay, J.I. Schroeder, Circadian rhythms. Daily watch on metabolism, Science. 318 (2007) 1730–1731.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

P. Sijacic, X. Wang, A.L. Skirpan, Y. Wang, P.E. Dowd, A.G. McCubbin, S. Huang, T.-H. Kao, Identification of the pollen determinant of S-RNase-mediated self-incompatibility, Nature. 429 (2004) 302–305.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

A. Boussabaine, Risk Pricing Strategies for Public-Private Partnerships Projects, John Wiley & Sons, Oxford, 2013.

An edited book

[1]

D.F. Levia, D. Carlyle-Moses, T. Tanaka, eds., Forest Hydrology and Biogeochemistry: Synthesis of Past Research and Future Directions, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

V. Vullo, F. Vivio, Disk of Uniform Strength, in: F. Vivio (Ed.), Rotors: Stress Analysis and Design, Springer, Milano, 2013: pp. 89–101.

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 Cancer Letters.

Blog post

[1]

J. O`Callaghan, Astronomers Have Found The Most Massive Brown Dwarf Ever, IFLScience. (2017). https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-have-found-the-most-massive-brown-dwarf-ever/ (accessed October 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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, Space Station: NASA Efforts To Establish a Design-To-Life-Cycle Cost Process, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1988.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

D. Brookman, Establishing context for referents in online chatroom conversations, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2009.

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]

A. Hartocollis, New Girl in School: Transgender Surgery at 18, New York Times. (2015) A1.

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	Cancer Letters
Abbreviation	Cancer Lett.
ISSN (print)	0304-3835
Scope	Cancer Research Oncology

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