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]

D.A. Garsin, Microbiology. Peptide signals sense and destroy target cells, Science 306 (2004) 2202–2203.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

L.R. Brunham, M.R. Hayden, Medicine. Whole-genome sequencing: the new standard of care?, Science 336 (2012) 1112–1113.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

D.R. Green, L. Galluzzi, G. Kroemer, Mitochondria and the autophagy-inflammation-cell death axis in organismal aging, Science 333 (2011) 1109–1112.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

E.S. Barton, D.W. White, J.S. Cathelyn, K.A. Brett-McClellan, M. Engle, M.S. Diamond, V.L. Miller, H.W. Virgin 4th, Herpesvirus latency confers symbiotic protection from bacterial infection, Nature 447 (2007) 326–329.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

R. Esmailzadeh, Broadband Wireless Communications Business, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2006.

An edited book

[1]

D. AbuZeina, Cross-Word Modeling for Arabic Speech Recognition, Springer US, Boston, MA, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

R.J. Atkinson, A. Rokas, G.N. Stone, Longitudinal patterns in species richness and genetic diversity in European oaks and oak gallwasps, in: S. Weiss, N. Ferrand (Eds.), Phylogeography of Southern European Refugia: Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Conservation of European Biodiversity, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2007: pp. 127–151.

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]

E. Andrew, Astronaut Alexander Gerst Made Mind-Blowing Time-Lapse Of Images From ISS, IFLScience (2014). https://www.iflscience.com/space/astronaut-alexander-gerst-made-mind-blowing-time-lapse-images-iss/ (accessed October 30, 2018).

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, Regulatory Programs: Opportunities to Enhance Oversight of the Real Estate Appraisal Industry, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2004.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

J.M. Bathon, Examining the characteristics of school leaders and of local schools where Indiana educational leadership preparation programs place their graduates, Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 2008.

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]

C.D. Shea, The Détente That Wasn’t: Putin’s Call to Elton John, New York Times (2015) A4.

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)