How to format your references using the Chemistry Central Journal citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Chemistry Central Journal. 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

Ellis J (2007) Beyond the standard model with the LHC. Nature 448:297–301

A journal article with 2 authors

Schirle NT, MacRae IJ (2012) The crystal structure of human Argonaute2. Science 336:1037–1040

A journal article with 3 authors

Ferguson NM, Donnelly CA, Anderson RM (2001) Transmission intensity and impact of control policies on the foot and mouth epidemic in Great Britain. Nature 413:542–548

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Alam MA, Smith RK, Weir BE, Silverman PJ (2002) Thin dielectric films: Uncorrelated breakdown of integrated circuits. Nature 420:378

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bailly P (2013) Materials and Structures under Shock and Impact. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, USA

An edited book

Talapatra SK (2015) Chemistry of Plant Natural Products: Stereochemistry, Conformation, Synthesis, Biology, and Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A chapter in an edited book

Chen L, Li M, Zhang J, et al (2014) A Statistical Method for Translating Chinese into Under-resourced Minority Languages. In: Shi X, Chen Y (eds) Machine Translation: 10th China Workshop, CWMT 2014, Macau, China, November 4-6, 2014. Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 49–60

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 Chemistry Central Journal.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015) Possible Link Between Red Meat Consumption And Increased Cancer Risk Identified. In: IFLScience. Accessed 30 Oct 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 (1974) CH-53E Helicopter. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Barkis B (2017) How Do Highly Engaged Employees and Managers Find Meaning in Their Work? Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University

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

Leland J (2017) ‘Weird Isn’t In Right Now.’ New York Times MB1

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	Chemistry Central Journal
Abbreviation	Chem. Cent. J.
ISSN (online)	1752-153X
Scope	General Chemistry