How to format your references using the Current Opinion in Chemical Biology citation style

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

Smaglik P: Closing the gap. Nature 2005, 433:335.

A journal article with 2 authors

Medlock J, Galvani AP: Optimizing influenza vaccine distribution. Science 2009, 325:1705–1708.

A journal article with 3 authors

Naeem S, Duffy JE, Zavaleta E: The functions of biological diversity in an age of extinction. Science 2012, 336:1401–1406.

A journal article with 11 or more authors

Head JW, Chapman CR, Strom RG, Fassett CI, Denevi BW, Blewett DT, Ernst CM, Watters TR, Solomon SC, Murchie SL, et al.: Flood volcanism in the northern high latitudes of Mercury revealed by MESSENGER. Science 2011, 333:1853–1856.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Dunnivant FM, Anders E: A Basic Introduction to Pollutant Fate and Transport. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2005.

An edited book

Padilla E, Phan PC (Eds): Christianities in Migration: The Global Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan US; 2016.

A chapter in an edited book

Kuki M, Nakajima H, Tsuchiya N, Tanaka J, Hata Y: Multi Human Movement Trajectory Extraction by Thermal Sensor. In Advanced Intelligent Systems. Edited by Kim YS, Ryoo YJ, Jang M-S, Bae Y-C. Springer International Publishing; 2014:35–49.

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 Opinion in Chemical Biology.

Blog post

Hale T: Good Musicians Have Significantly Faster Reaction Times. IFLScience 2017,

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: Automatic Data Processing Activity in the Feed Materials Production Center, Fernald, Ohio. U.S. Government Printing Office; 1975.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Carpenter DM: Understanding the effect of conflicting information on medication adherence for vasculitis patients. 2009,

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

Gustines GG: DC and Marvel, Beware: Valiant Is to Make Films. New York Times 2015,

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	Current Opinion in Chemical Biology
Abbreviation	Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1367-5931
ISSN (online)	1879-0402
Scope	Biochemistry Analytical Chemistry

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