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 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

D. Gough. Astronomy. How oblate is the Sun? Science 2012, 337 (6102), 1611–1612.

A journal article with 2 authors

J. Phillips-Silver, L.J. Trainor. Feeling the beat: movement influences infant rhythm perception. Science 2005, 308 (5727), 1430.

A journal article with 3 authors

H. Hu, J. Gan, P. Jonas. Interneurons. Fast-spiking, parvalbumin⁺ GABAergic interneurons: from cellular design to microcircuit function. Science 2014, 345 (6196), 1255263.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

M.E.K. Niemi, H.C. Martin, D.L. Rice, et al. Common genetic variants contribute to risk of rare severe neurodevelopmental disorders. Nature 2018, 562 (7726), 268–271.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

S. Mubarak. Construction Project Scheduling and Control; John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2010.

An edited book

MICAI 2009: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: 8th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Guanajuato, México, November 9-13, 2009. Proceedings; Aguirre, A. H., Borja, R. M., Garciá, C. A. R., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009; Vol. 5845.

A chapter in an edited book

X. Ning, Y. Yan, K. Qu, Z. Li. Reliability Analysis on Wing Structures under the Gust Load. In Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence: International Conference, AICI 2010, Sanya, China, October 23-24, 2010, Proceedings, Part II; Wang, F. L., Deng, H., Gao, Y., Lei, J., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010; pp 31–37.

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

D. Andrew. How Smartphone Light Affects Your Brain And Body (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. Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Program Staffing; RCED-96-162R; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

J.A. Moran. Investigating the circumstellar environments of young stars with the PROMPT polarimeter. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 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

J. Ryerson. University Presses. New York Times. August 25, 2017, p BR35.

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