How to format your references using the Forensic Chemistry citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Forensic Chemistry. 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

[1]

M. Watanabe, Part-time teaching: benefitting as a part-time teacher, Nature. 424 (2003) 110–111.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

V. von Messling, R. Cattaneo, Virology. A henipavirus vaccine in sight, Science. 337 (2012) 651–652.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

J. Elf, G.-W. Li, X.S. Xie, Probing transcription factor dynamics at the single-molecule level in a living cell, Science. 316 (2007) 1191–1194.

A journal article with 4 or more authors

[1]

I. Wapinski, A. Pfeffer, N. Friedman, A. Regev, Natural history and evolutionary principles of gene duplication in fungi, Nature. 449 (2007) 54–61.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

G.H. Gaynor, Decisions, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2014.

An edited book

[1]

W.H. Tang, Condition Monitoring and Assessment of Power Transformers Using Computational Intelligence, Springer, London, 2011.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

V. Degiorgio, I. Cristiani, Modulazione, in: I. Cristiani (Ed.), Note Di Fotonica, Springer, Milano, 2012: pp. 103–124.

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 Forensic Chemistry.

Blog post

[1]

E. Andrew, Functional Leg Muscle Developed From Stem Cells, IFLScience. (2015). https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/functional-leg-muscle-developed-stem-cells/ (accessed October 30, 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, Department of Homeland Security: Oversight and Coordination of Research and Development Should Be Strengthened, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2012.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

P.G. Poldervaart, A qualitative study of nursing didactic programs: Novice nurses’ perception of competence, confidence, and retention, Doctoral dissertation, University of Phoenix, 2010.

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]

J. Wagner, Baseball; Mets Face Pitching Decisions, New York Times. (2017) B12.

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	Forensic Chemistry
Abbreviation	Forensic Chem.
ISSN (print)	2468-1709
Scope	Analytical Chemistry Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Spectroscopy Materials Chemistry Pathology and Forensic Medicine Law

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