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

Groves JT (2006) Chemistry. Unveiling the membrane domains. Science 313:1901–1902

A journal article with 2 authors

Hirschberg J, Manning CD (2015) Advances in natural language processing. Science 349:261–266

A journal article with 3 authors

Hannon JB, Tersoff J, Tromp RM (2002) Surface stress and thermodynamic nanoscale size selection. Science 295:299–301

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Gee ML, Burton M, Grevis-James A, et al (2013) Imaging the action of antimicrobial peptides on living bacterial cells. Sci Rep 3:1557

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Johnson A (2014) Small Animal Pathology for Veterinary Technicians. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK

An edited book

Tomalty R (2015) America’s Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border. Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, Washington, DC

A chapter in an edited book

Stober T, Hansmann U (2010) Tooling. In: Hansmann U (ed) Agile Software Development: Best Practices for Large Software Development Projects. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 61–73

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

Hamilton K (2016) Some People Can’t See, But Still Think They Can: Here’s How The Brain Controls Our Vision. In: IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/some-people-cant-see-but-still-think-they-can-heres-how-the-brain-controls-our-vision/. 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 (2014) Export Controls: NASA Management Action and Improved Oversight Needed to Reduce the Risk of Unauthorized Access to Its Technologies. 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

Lutchman C (2008) Leadership impact on turnover among power engineers in the Oil Sands of Alberta. Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix

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

Williams J (2017) Zinzi Clemmons. New York Times C18

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