How to format your references using the China Communications citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for China Communications. 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

[1]

J. P. Sethna, “Materials science. Crackling wires,” Science, vol. 318, no. 5848, pp. 207–208, Oct. 2007.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

H. Choi and P. T. C. So, “Improving femtosecond laser pulse delivery through a hollow core photonic crystal fiber for temporally focused two-photon endomicroscopy,” Sci. Rep., vol. 4, p. 6626, Oct. 2014.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A. Barta, S. Dorner, and N. Polacek, “Mechanism of ribosomal peptide bond formation,” Science, vol. 291, no. 5502, p. 203, Jan. 2001.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

S. Reissmann et al., “Taming of a poison: biosynthesis of the NiFe-hydrogenase cyanide ligands,” Science, vol. 299, no. 5609, pp. 1067–1070, Feb. 2003.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

D. J. Cumming, Venture Capital. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

An edited book

[1]

S. Banerjee, V. Mukherjee, and S. K. Haldar, Eds., Understanding Development: An Indian Perspective on Legal and Economic Policy, 1st ed. 2016. in India Studies in Business and Economics. New Delhi: Springer India, 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

G. Dzemyda, O. Kurasova, and J. Žilinskas, “Combining Multidimensional Scaling with Artificial Neural Networks,” in Multidimensional Data Visualization: Methods and Applications, O. Kurasova and J. Žilinskas, Eds., in Springer Optimization and Its Applications. , New York, NY: Springer, 2013, pp. 113–177.

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 China Communications.

Blog post

[1]

S. Luntz, “How Plants Can Become Zombies,” IFLScience. Accessed: Oct. 30, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-plants-become-zombies/

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, “FCC: Competitive Service Safeguards for Local Exchange Carrier Provision of Commercial Mobile Radio Services and Implementation of Section 601(d) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, OGC-98-21, Dec. 1997.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

L. McNamee, “Best Practices in Higher Education Faculty Motivation,” Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, 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]

J. Poniewozik, “Clawing Her Way Back to Normal,” New York Times, p. C1, Feb. 16, 2017.

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	China Communications
Abbreviation	China Commun.
ISSN (print)	1673-5447
Scope