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

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

Fairley P 2011 Introduction: Next generation biofuels Nature 474 S2-5

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Dill K A and MacCallum J L 2012 The protein-folding problem, 50 years on Science 338 1042–6

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Lin X, Fauqué B and Behnia K 2015 SOLID-STATE PHYSICS. Scalable T² resistivity in a small single-component Fermi surface Science 349 945–8

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Kamermans M, Fahrenfort I, Schultz K, Janssen-Bienhold U, Sjoerdsma T and Weiler R 2001 Hemichannel-mediated inhibition in the outer retina Science 292 1178–80

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Frikha M 2013 Ad Hoc Networks (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Dale C and Anderson T 2012 Achieving Systems Safety: Proceedings of the Twentieth Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, Bristol, UK, 7-9th February 2012 (London: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Grange L L 2011 The Philosophy of Ubuntu and Education in South Africa Education and Humanism: Linking Autonomy and Humanity ed W Veugelers (Rotterdam: SensePublishers) pp 67–78

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 Chinese Physics Letters.

Blog post

[1]

Evans K 2017 Male Contraceptive Gel Proves 100% Successful In Monkey Trials IFLScience

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 2006 Natural Gas Pipeline Safety: Risk-Based Standards Should Allow Operators to Better Tailor Reassessments to Pipeline Threats (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office)

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Howard G M 2012 Roles of vitamin D and calcium in cancer and diet history Doctoral dissertation (Mississippi State, MS: Mississippi State 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

[1]

Belson K and Pilon M 2012 Track Town USA and Meet It Wants to Keep New York Times D3

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	Chinese Physics Letters
Abbreviation	Chin. Physics Lett.
ISSN (print)	0256-307X
ISSN (online)	1741-3540
Scope	General Physics and Astronomy