How to format your references using the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Journal of Traditional Chinese 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	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]

Arrigo KR. Marine microorganisms and global nutrient cycles. Nature 2005;437:349–55.

A journal article with 2 authors

[1]

Dresselhaus MS, Thomas IL. Alternative energy technologies. Nature 2001;414:332–7.

A journal article with 3 authors

[1]

Makovicky PJ, Apesteguía S, Agnolín FL. The earliest dromaeosaurid theropod from South America. Nature 2005;437:1007–11.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

[1]

Douglas SM, Dietz H, Liedl T, Högberg B, Graf F, Shih WM. Self-assembly of DNA into nanoscale three-dimensional shapes. Nature 2009;459:414–8.

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

[1]

Cohen M. Mind Games. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell; 2010.

An edited book

[1]

Shiozawa Y. Artificial Market Experiments with the U-Mart System. vol. 4. Tokyo: Springer Japan; 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

[1]

Bott O, Hamm F. Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect. In: Hemforth B, Mertins B, Fabricius-Hansen C, editors. Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages, Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2014, p. 83–109.

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 Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Blog post

[1]

Hale T. Vets Remove 915 Coins From Inside Sea Turtle’s Stomach In Thailand. IFLScience 2017. https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/vets-remove-915-coins-from-inside-sea-turtles-stomach-in-thailand/ (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. Scientific Research: Continued Vigilance Critical to Protecting Human Subjects. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1996.

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

[1]

Giles DM. A study of remotely sensed aerosol properties from ground-based sun and sky scanning radiometers. Doctoral dissertation. University of Maryland, College Park, 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]

Barker K, Taylor K. A Teacher Accused of Abuse Seen to Have Never Grown Up. New York Times 2014:A1.

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	Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine
ISSN (print)	0254-6272
Scope	General Medicine