How to format your references using the Current Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Current Biology. 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

Nürnberg, D. (2000). PALEOCLIMATE: Taking the Temperature of Past Ocean Surfaces. Science 289, 1698–1699.

A journal article with 2 authors

Riddihough, G., and Zahn, L.M. (2010). Epigenetics. What is epigenetics? Introduction. Science 330, 611.

A journal article with 3 authors

Yang, R., Willett, S.D., and Goren, L. (2015). In situ low-relief landscape formation as a result of river network disruption. Nature 520, 526–529.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Glur, L., Wirth, S.B., Büntgen, U., Gilli, A., Haug, G.H., Schär, C., Beer, J., and Anselmetti, F.S. (2013). Frequent floods in the European Alps coincide with cooler periods of the past 2500 years. Sci. Rep. 3, 2770.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Horton, I. (2010). Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++® 2010 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

An edited book

Haque, M.O. (2005). Income Elasticity and Economic Development: Methods and Applications J. Marquez, F. G. Adams, P. Balestra, M. G. Dagenais, D. Kendrick, J. H. P. Paelinck, R. S. Pindyck, and W. Welfe, eds. (Boston, MA: Springer US).

A chapter in an edited book

Izmailov, I., Poizner, B., Romanov, I., and Smolskiy, S. (2016). Optical Vortices in Ring and Non-ring Interferometers and a Model of the Digital Communication System. In Cryptology Transmitted Message Protection: From Deterministic Chaos up to Optical Vortices Signals and Communication Technology., B. Poizner, I. Romanov, and S. Smolskiy, eds. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), pp. 259–332.

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 Current Biology.

Blog post

Andrew, E. (2015). New CT Reveals Inner Structures of Body in Exquisite Detail. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/new-ct-reveals-inner-structures-body-exquisite-detail/.

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 (1990). Airline Deregulation: Trends in Airfares at Airports in Small and Medium-Sized 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

Wilson, B.R. (2009). A correlational study: Parental involvement to student achievement in public education.

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

Crow, K. (2001). City Is to Build the Largest DNA Lab, for a Grim Task. New York Times, 147.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets:

This sentence cites one reference [2].
This sentence cites two references [2,4].
This sentence cites four references [2,4,6,8].

About the journal

Full journal title	Current Biology
Abbreviation	Curr. Biol.
ISSN (print)	0960-9822
ISSN (online)	1879-0445
Scope	General Agricultural and Biological Sciences General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology