How to format your references using the Contemporary Clinical Trials citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Contemporary Clinical Trials. 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

[1]

J. Liu, Disease outbreak: Finish the fight against Ebola, Nature 524 (2015) 27–29.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Z. Zhang, J. Wang, Long-range hybrid wedge plasmonic waveguide, Sci. Rep. 4 (2014) 6870.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

A. Kessler, R. Halitschke, I.T. Baldwin, Silencing the jasmonate cascade: induced plant defenses and insect populations, Science 305 (2004) 665–668.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

J.F. Gillooly, E.L. Charnov, G.B. West, V.M. Savage, J.H. Brown, Effects of size and temperature on developmental time, Nature 417 (2002) 70–73.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

R.G. Kunz, Environmental Calculations, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2009.

An edited book

[1]

J. Chai, Deformation Analysis in Soft Ground Improvement, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

D. Ndayikengurukiye, M. Mignotte, High-Frequency Spectral Energy Map Estimation Based Gait Analysis System Using a Depth Camera for Pathology Detection, in: A. Campilho, F. Karray (Eds.), Image Analysis and Recognition: 13th International Conference, ICIAR 2016, in Memory of Mohamed Kamel, Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, July 13-15, 2016, Proceedings, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2016: pp. 38–45.

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 Contemporary Clinical Trials.

Blog post

[1]

S. Luntz, Supercooled Helium Seems To Defy Gravity, IFLScience (2014).

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, Abstinence Education: Efforts to Assess the Accuracy and Effectiveness of Federally Funded Programs, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2006.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

H.J. Hong, Acrolein Modification of Human Apolipoprotein A-I Impairs Binding to Phosphatidylglycerol and Lipopolysaccharide of Gram-Negative Bacteria, Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach, 2017.

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]

A. Higgins, Putin Butts In to Claim There Were No Secrets, And Says He’ll Prove It, New York Times (2017) A16.

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	Contemporary Clinical Trials
Abbreviation	Contemp. Clin. Trials
ISSN (print)	1551-7144
Scope	General Medicine Pharmacology (medical)