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

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

PaperpileThe citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNoteFind the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and othersThe style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeXBibTeX 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]
M.S. Smith, Change the approach to sustainable development, Nature 483 (2012) 375.
A journal article with 2 authors
[1]
J.H. Nadeau, A.M. Dudley, Genetics. Systems genetics, Science 331 (2011) 1015–1016.
A journal article with 3 authors
[1]
O. Bannard, M. Kraman, D.T. Fearon, Secondary replicative function of CD8+ T cells that had developed an effector phenotype, Science 323 (2009) 505–509.
A journal article with 4 or more authors
[1]
A.A.V. Albertini, A.K. Wernimont, T. Muziol, R.B.G. Ravelli, C.R. Clapier, G. Schoehn, W. Weissenhorn, R.W.H. Ruigrok, Crystal structure of the rabies virus nucleoprotein-RNA complex, Science 313 (2006) 360–363.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book
[1]
A.R. Conklin Jr., Introduction to Soil Chemistry, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005.
An edited book
[1]
H.F. Moed, W. Glänzel, U. Schmoch, eds., Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2005.
A chapter in an edited book
[1]
S. Termini, M.E. Tabacchi, Specificities and Vagaries of Medicine from the Viewpoint of Hard Sciences, in: R. Seising, M.E. Tabacchi (Eds.), Fuzziness and Medicine: Philosophical Reflections and Application Systems in Health Care: A Companion Volume to Sadegh-Zadeh’s Handbook of Analytical Philosophy of Medicine, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013: pp. 77–81.

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 Communications.

Blog post
[1]
A. Carpineti, Telescope Made From Water Allows Astronomers To Look Into The Extreme Energy Universe, IFLScience (2016). https://www.iflscience.com/space/water-telescope-look-extreme-energy-universe/ (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, Telecommunications: FCC Needs to Improve Its Ability to Monitor and Determine the Extent of Competition in Dedicated Access Services, 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. Jin, Periodic Motions and Bifurcation Tree in a Periodically Excited Duffing Oscillator with Time-delay, Doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 2014.

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]
B. Widdicombe, Humming Along With the Dead, New York Times (2017) ST1.

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 titleContemporary Clinical Trials Communications
AbbreviationContemp. Clin. Trials Commun.
ISSN (print)2451-8654
Scope

Other styles