How to format your references using the Chemical Physics Letters citation style

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

S. Kirkpatrick, Computer science. Rough times ahead, Science. 299 (2003) 668–669.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

F. Turck, G. Coupland, Plant science. When vernalization makes sense, Science. 331 (2011) 36–37.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J.W. Shay, R.R. Reddel, W.E. Wright, Cancer. Cancer and telomeres--an ALTernative to telomerase, Science. 336 (2012) 1388–1390.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

L.T. Smith, L.E.O.C. Aragão, C.E. Sabel, T. Nakaya, Drought impacts on children’s respiratory health in the Brazilian Amazon, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 3726.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D.H. Richter, Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2017.

An edited book

[1]

P. Cimiano, H.S. Pinto, eds., Knowledge Engineering and Management by the Masses: 17th International Conference, EKAW 2010, Lisbon, Portugal, October 11-15, 2010. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

M. Mansour, Consumable and Expendable Material Support as an Element of Modular Product Service Systems in the Aviation MRO Industry, in: J. Hesselbach, C. Herrmann (Eds.), Functional Thinking for Value Creation: Proceedings of the 3rd CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product Service Systems, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany, May 5th - 6th, 2011, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011: pp. 13–13.

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 Physics Letters.

Blog post

[1]

J. Davis, Researchers Develop An Experimental MERS Vaccine, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/researchers-develop-experimental-mers-vaccine/ (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, The Title I Program for the Handicapped, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1977.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

S.K. Schroeder, Tau-Directed Immunotherapy for Alzheimer’s Disease, Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida, 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]

S. Kishkovsky, Governor Backs Pardoning Russian Who Killed Chechen Woman, New York Times. (2004) A5.

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	Chemical Physics Letters
Abbreviation	Chem. Phys. Lett.
ISSN (print)	0009-2614
Scope	Physical and Theoretical Chemistry General Physics and Astronomy