How to format your references using the eLife citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for eLife. 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	Find the style here: output styles overview
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

Müller-Wodarg ICF. 2006. Planetary science. Exploring other worlds to learn more about our own. Science 312:1319–1320.

A journal article with 2 authors

Möller K, Bein T. 2011. Chemistry. Pores within pores--how to craft ordered hierarchical zeolites. Science 333:297–298.

A journal article with 3 authors

Vignal C, Mathevon N, Mottin S. 2004. Audience drives male songbird response to partner’s voice. Nature 430:448–451.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

Preker P, Nielsen J, Kammler S, Lykke-Andersen S, Christensen MS, Mapendano CK, Schierup MH, Jensen TH. 2008. RNA exosome depletion reveals transcription upstream of active human promoters. Science 322:1851–1854.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Lee WF. 2005. Verilog Coding for Logic Synthesis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An edited book

Modrow S. 2013. Molecular Virology. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

A chapter in an edited book

Moghrabi IAR, Al-Mohammed AR. 2016. Social Media or Social Business Networks? In: Dwivedi YK, Mäntymäki M, Ravishankar MN, Janssen M, Clement M, Slade EL, Rana NP, Al-Sharhan S, Simintiras AC, editors. Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: 15th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society, I3E 2016, Swansea, UK, September 13–15, 2016, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 42–52.

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 eLife.

Blog post

Hamilton K. 2016. Ancient Asteroid Impacts Yield Evidence For The Nature Of The Early Earth. IFLScience. https://www.iflscience.com/space/ancient-asteroid-impacts-yield-evidence-for-the-nature-of-the-early-earth/

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. 2016. NASA: Assessments of Major Projects (No. GAO-16-309SP). 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

Chirwa KU. 2017. Encumbered Existence: A Three Movement Work for Jazz Orchestra (Doctoral dissertation). Lafayette, LA: University of Louisiana.

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. 2008. Court Hears Arguments On Americans Held in Iraq. New York Times A16.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Müller-Wodarg, 2006).
This sentence cites two references (Möller and Bein, 2011; Müller-Wodarg, 2006).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Möller and Bein, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Preker et al., 2008)

About the journal

Full journal title	eLife
ISSN (online)	2050-084X
Scope