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]

Smith C 2005 Genomics: genotyping gets up to speed Nature 435 992

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Bayon R and Jenkins M 2010 The business of biodiversity Nature 466 184–5

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Sharma B, Mandani S and Sarma T K 2013 Biogenic growth of alloys and core-shell nanostructures using urease as a nanoreactor at ambient conditions Sci. Rep. 3 2601

A journal article with 99 or more authors

[1]

Blakemore C, Dawkins R, Noble D and Yudkin M 2003 Is a scientific boycott ever justified? Nature 421 314

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Tanwir S and Perros H 2014 VBR Video Traffic Models (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)

An edited book

[1]

Sasano T and Suzuki O 2010 Interface Oral Health Science 2009 (Tokyo: Springer Japan)

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Li X and Mao Y 2016 Sharp Bounds of the Generalized (Edge-)Connectivity Generalized Connectivity of Graphs SpringerBriefs in Mathematics ed Y Mao (Cham: Springer International Publishing) pp 41–57

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]

Taub B 2016 “Princess Leia Brainwaves” Help Consolidate Memories While We Sleep 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 2007 Commercial Aviation: Programs and Options for Providing Air Service to Small Communities (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]

McPherson C A 2012 Characterization of the neurogenic microenvironment in the mouse hippocampus following chemical-induced neuronal injury Doctoral dissertation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina)

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]

Brantley B 2017 A Mythic Force of Anger, Raging in Wales New York Times C6

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

Research and Writing Guides