How to format your references using the Computational Biology and Chemistry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Computational Biology and Chemistry. 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	Download the output style file
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

Kolber, A., 2011. Neuroethics: Give memory-altering drugs a chance. Nature 476, 275–276.

A journal article with 2 authors

Kulesa, P.M., Fraser, S.E., 2002. Cell dynamics during somite boundary formation revealed by time-lapse analysis. Science 298, 991–995.

A journal article with 3 authors

Bohossian, H.B., Skaletsky, H., Page, D.C., 2000. Unexpectedly similar rates of nucleotide substitution found in male and female hominids. Nature 406, 622–625.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Moisan, N., Malinowski, G., Mauchain, J., Hehn, M., Vodungbo, B., Lüning, J., Mangin, S., Fullerton, E.E., Thiaville, A., 2014. Investigating the role of superdiffusive currents in laser induced demagnetization of ferromagnets with nanoscale magnetic domains. Sci. Rep. 4, 4658.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Scheringer, M., 2002. Persistence and Spatial Range of Environmental Chemicals. Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, FRG.

An edited book

Raś, Z.W., Tsumoto, S., Zighed, D. (Eds.), 2008. Mining Complex Data: ECML/PKDD 2007 Third International Workshop, MCD 2007, Warsaw, Poland, September 17-21, 2007, Revised Selected Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

A chapter in an edited book

Arnay, R., Acosta, L., Sigut, M., Toledo, J.T., 2009. Detection of Non-structured Roads Using Visible and Infrared Images and an Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm, in: Krasnogor, N., Melián-Batista, M.B., Pérez, J.A.M., Moreno-Vega, J.M., Pelta, D.A. (Eds.), Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO 2008), Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 37–47.

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 Computational Biology and Chemistry.

Blog post

Hale, T., 2017. Scotland Sees Record-Smashing Numbers Of Dolphins [WWW Document]. IFLScience. URL https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/scotland-sees-recordsmashing-numbers-of-dolphins/ (accessed 10.30.18).

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

Government Accountability Office, 1971. Influence Of Public Affairs Organizations On Information And Advertising Programs (No. B-161939). U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Verret, J.E., 2019. Property Tax Limitations, School District Revenues, and Equity: Analyses of Pennsylvania’s Act One (Doctoral dissertation). George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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

Mele, C., 2017. Pirate Joe’s, Unauthorized Canadian Seller of Booty From U.S. Chain, Closes. New York Times B2.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Kolber, 2011).
This sentence cites two references (Kolber, 2011; Kulesa and Fraser, 2002).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Kulesa and Fraser, 2002)
Three or more authors: (Moisan et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Computational Biology and Chemistry
Abbreviation	Comput. Biol. Chem.
ISSN (print)	1476-9271
Scope	Biochemistry Structural Biology Organic Chemistry Computational Mathematics