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]

Robinson C 2005 Flight of fancy Nature 434 827

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Gombosi T I and Ingersoll A P 2010 Saturn: atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere Science 327 1476–9

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Xue S, Calvin K and Li H 2006 RNA recognition and cleavage by a splicing endonuclease Science 312 906–10

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Chaimanee Y, Jolly D, Benammi M, Tafforeau P, Duzer D, Moussa I and Jaeger J-J 2003 A Middle Miocene hominoid from Thailand and orangutan origins Nature 422 61–5

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Bliesner D M 2006 Establishing a CGMP Laboratory Audit System (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

An edited book

[1]

Barthe G 2011 Programming Languages and Systems: 20th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2011, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2011, Saarbrücken, Germany, March 26–April 3, 2011. Proceedings vol 6602 (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Gabel T and Riedmiller M 2006 Multi-agent Case-Based Reasoning for Cooperative Reinforcement Learners Advances in Case-Based Reasoning: 8th European Conference, ECCBR 2006 Fethiye, Turkey, September 4-7, 2006 Proceedings Lecture Notes in Computer Science ed T R Roth-Berghofer, M H Göker and H A Güvenir (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer) pp 32–46

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]

Fang J 2015 Fossil Fuel Emissions Could Mess With Radiocarbon Dating 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 2003 NASA: Shuttle Fleet’s Safe Return to Flight Is Key to Space Station Progress (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]

Wright E A 2012 Assessing Leadership Behaviors and Demographic Characteristics of Project Managers Associated Through LinkedIn Doctoral dissertation (Scottsdale, AZ: Northcentral 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]

Sisario B 2017 Another Failed Festival Puts Industry on Edge New York Times B1

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

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