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]

Taylor W R 2005 Stirring the primordial soup Nature 434 705

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Boyd R W and Gauthier D J 2009 Controlling the velocity of light pulses Science 326 1074–7

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Dubrovinskaia N, Dubrovinsky L and Solozhenko V L 2007 Comment on “Synthesis of ultra-incompressible superhard rhenium diboride at ambient pressure” Science 318 1550; author reply 1550

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Volkmann N, Amann K J, Stoilova-McPhie S, Egile C, Winter D C, Hazelwood L, Heuser J E, Li R, Pollard T D and Hanein D 2001 Structure of Arp2/3 complex in its activated state and in actin filament branch junctions Science 293 2456–9

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Kula G, Raab M and Stahn S 2017 Beyond Smart Beta (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Ceccatelli S and Aschner M 2012 Methylmercury and Neurotoxicity vol 2 (Boston, MA: Springer US)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Ren F, Yin L and Li H 2012 Science Popularization Studies in China Science Communication in the World: Practices, Theories and Trends ed B Schiele, M Claessens and S Shi (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands) pp 65–79

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]

Andrew D 2016 Human Experiments – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly 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 1992 Airport Development: Improvement Needed in Federal Planning (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]

Baker T N 2017 The Impact of Undergraduate Research Participation on Research Self-Efficacy Doctoral dissertation (Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic 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]

Gustines G G 2015 Murphy Anderson, 89, Longtime DC Comics Artist New York Times B10

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