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

Adler, M. (2012). Structural biology. How a neurotoxin survives. Science 335, 928–929.

A journal article with 2 authors

Ohlstein, B., and Spradling, A. (2006). The adult Drosophila posterior midgut is maintained by pluripotent stem cells. Nature 439, 470–474.

A journal article with 3 authors

Wu, J., Zhang, C., and Qiao, H. (2014). The significance of p40 expression in sclerosing hemangioma of lung. Sci. Rep. 4, 6102.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Zhong, W., Feng, H., Santiago, F.E., and Kipreos, E.T. (2003). CUL-4 ubiquitin ligase maintains genome stability by restraining DNA-replication licensing. Nature 423, 885–889.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Bard, J., and Kovarik, V.J., Jr. (2007). Software Defined Radio (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).

An edited book

Damjanov, I., and Fan, F. eds. (2013). Cancer Grading Manual 2nd ed. 2013. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer).

A chapter in an edited book

Kolaczyk, E.D., and Csárdi, G. (2014). Descriptive Analysis of Network Graph Characteristics. In Statistical Analysis of Network Data with R Use R!, G. Csárdi, ed. (New York, NY: Springer), pp. 43–67.

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). Another Chimpanzee Personhood Claim Fails, But There’s Hope Yet. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/another-chimpanzee-personhood-claim-fails-there-s-hope-yet/.

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 (2012). Information Technology: Department of Labor Could Further Facilitate Modernization of States’ Unemployment Insurance Systems (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

Simon, J.T. (2017). Classification of Mechanical and Electrical Response of High Performance Fiber Reinforced-Geopolymer Composites (HPFR-GPC).

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

Feeney, K. (2009). Deliciousness From Italy. New York Times, NJ11.

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

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