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

Weinberg, D.H. (2005). Astronomy. Mapping the large-scale structure of the universe. Science 309, 564–565.

A journal article with 2 authors

Richter, J.D., and Theurkauf, W.E. (2001). Development. The message is in the translation. Science 293, 60–62.

A journal article with 3 authors

Moore, J.D., Kirk, J.A., and Hunt, T. (2003). Unmasking the S-phase-promoting potential of cyclin B1. Science 300, 987–990.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Kumar, V., Chichili, V.P.R., Zhong, L., Tang, X., Velazquez-Campoy, A., Sheu, F.-S., Seetharaman, J., Gerges, N.Z., and Sivaraman, J. (2013). Structural basis for the interaction of unstructured neuron specific substrates neuromodulin and neurogranin with Calmodulin. Sci. Rep. 3, 1392.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Storey, I.C., and Allan, A. (2008). A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd).

An edited book

Pham, H. ed. (2008). Recent Advances in Reliability and Quality in Design (London: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Kumar, A., Zhu, X., Tu, Y.-C., and Pandit, S. (2013). Compression in Molecular Simulation Datasets. In Intelligence Science and Big Data Engineering: 4th International Conference, IScIDE 2013, Beijing, China, July 31 – August 2, 2013, Revised Selected Papers Lecture Notes in Computer Science., C. Sun, F. Fang, Z.-H. Zhou, W. Yang, and Z.-Y. Liu, eds. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer), pp. 22–29.

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

Fang, J. (2014). Beetles Brandish the Best Weapons for their Fighting Style. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/beetles-brandish-best-weapons-their-fighting-style/.

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 (2001). NASA: International Space Station and Shuttle Support Cost Limits (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

Grantham, S.C. (2014). Dual Eligibles’ Experience of Care in North Carolina’s Patient-Centered Medical Home.

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

Greenhouse, L. (2007). High Court Puts Limits On Patents. New York Times, C1.

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