How to format your references using the Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 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

[1]

B. Owens, “Melanoma,” Nature, vol. 515, no. 7527, p. S109, Nov. 2014.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

S. Bhalerao and T. R. Clandinin, “Cell biology. Vitamin K2 takes charge,” Science, vol. 336, no. 6086, pp. 1241–1242, Jun. 2012.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

P. R. Bandyopadhyay, H. A. Leinhos, and A. M. Hellum, “Handedness helps homing in swimming and flying animals,” Sci. Rep., vol. 3, p. 1128, Jan. 2013.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

P. I. Kitov, J. M. Sadowska, G. Mulvey, et al., “Shiga-like toxins are neutralized by tailored multivalent carbohydrate ligands,” Nature, vol. 403, no. 6770, pp. 669–672, Feb. 2000.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

R. A. Alberty, Enzyme Kinetics: Rapid-Equilibrium Enzyme Kinetics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011.

An edited book

[1]

A. Hameurlain, J. Küng, and R. Wagner, Eds., Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems V, vol. 7100. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2012.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

V. Kubíčková, “Application of Survival Analysis on Analysing the Association Between Chromosomal Aberrations and Carcinoma,” in Applications of Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Technology, R. Bris, J. Majernik, K. Pancerz, and E. Zaitseva, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 93–102.

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 Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, “Panda Fakes Pregnancy To Get More Food,” IFLScience, 28-Aug-2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/panda-fakes-pregnancy-get-more-food/. [Accessed: 30-Oct-2018].

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

[1]

Government Accountability Office, “Lost in Space?,” U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 146027, Jan. 1992.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

R. R. Swinford, “Adapted dance - connecting mind, body and soul,” Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 2012.

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

[1]

B. Kenigsberg, “The Revolution Will Be Filmed,” New York Times, p. C4, 27-Jun-2017.

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	Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Abbreviation	Evid. Based. Complement. Alternat. Med.
ISSN (print)	1741-427X
ISSN (online)	1741-4288
Scope	Complementary and alternative medicine