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

J.R. Winkler. Chemistry. FRETting over the spectroscopic ruler. Science 2013, 339 (6127), 1530–1531.

A journal article with 2 authors

J.R. Terman, A.L. Kolodkin. Nervy links protein kinase a to plexin-mediated semaphorin repulsion. Science 2004, 303 (5661), 1204–1207.

A journal article with 3 authors

C. Wang, A.C. Potter, T. Senthil. Classification of interacting electronic topological insulators in three dimensions. Science 2014, 343 (6171), 629–631.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

S. Weldeab, D.W. Lea, R.R. Schneider, N. Andersen. 155,000 years of West African monsoon and ocean thermal evolution. Science 2007, 316 (5829), 1303–1307.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

J.A. Bower. Statistical Methods for Food Science; John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford, UK, 2013.

An edited book

Renormalization Group and Effective Field Theory Approaches to Many-Body Systems; Schwenk, A., Polonyi, J., Eds.; Lecture Notes in Physics; Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012; Vol. 852.

A chapter in an edited book

M. Bentivoglio, M. Nygård, M. Palomba, K. Kristensson. The Biological Clock in Inflammation and Sleep Switch Alterations. In Neuroimmunology of Sleep; Pandi-Perumal, S. R., Cardinali, D. P., Chrousos, G. P., Eds.; Springer US, Boston, MA, 2007; pp 87–96.

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

J. Davis. Hawaiian Crow Found To Use Sticks As Tools https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/hawaiian-crow-found-to-use-sticks-as-tools/ (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. Proposed Revision to Armed Services Procurement Regulation for Cost Principles on Independent Research and Development Costs; B-164912; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1976.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

D.J. Neal. Prehospital Patient Triage in Mass Casualty Incidents: An engineering management analysis and prototype strategy recommendation. Doctoral dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 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

K. Crow. Disaster? You Call This a Disaster? New Yorkers Rank Last in Plans. New York Times. March 30, 2003, p 145.

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

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