How to format your references using the Nature Chemical Biology citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Nature 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

Weinreich, M. Molecular biology: DNA replication reconstructed. Nature 519, 418–419 (2015).

A journal article with 2 authors

Caffrey, D. R. & Fitzgerald, K. A. Immunology. Select inflammasome assembly. Science 336, 420–421 (2012).

A journal article with 3 authors

Taylor, B. W., Flecker, A. S. & Hall, R. O., Jr. Loss of a harvested fish species disrupts carbon flow in a diverse tropical river. Science 313, 833–836 (2006).

A journal article with 6 or more authors

Wang, D. et al. Reprogramming transcription by distinct classes of enhancers functionally defined by eRNA. Nature 474, 390–394 (2011).

Books and book chapters

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

An authored book

Krause, T. R. Leading with Safety. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, 2005).

An edited book

Case Studies of Building Pathology in Cultural Heritage. vol. 7 (Springer, Singapore, 2016).

A chapter in an edited book

Gonçalves, R., Knorr, M. & Leite, J. Evolving Bridge Rules in Evolving Multi-Context Systems. in Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems: 15th International Workshop, CLIMA XV, Prague, Czech Republic, August 18-19, 2014. Proceedings (eds. Bulling, N., Torre, L. van der, Villata, S., Jamroga, W. & Vasconcelos, W.) 52–69 (Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2014).

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 Nature Chemical Biology.

Blog post

Andrew, D. Why Urban Myths About Education Are So Persistent – And How To Tackle Them. IFLScience (2016).

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. Motor Carrier Safety: A Statistical Approach Will Better Identify Commercial Carriers That Pose High Crash Risks Than Does the Current Federal Approach. (2007).

Theses and dissertations

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

Doctoral dissertation

Francom, C. Análisis sociolingüístico de eleccion de lengua en encuentros de servicio: Una perspectiva etnográfica y experimental. (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 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

Feeney, K. Try a Cookie. Happiness Awaits. New York Times 14NJ13 (2007).

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

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	Nature Chemical Biology
Abbreviation	Nat. Chem. Biol.
ISSN (print)	1552-4450
ISSN (online)	1552-4469
Scope	Cell Biology Molecular Biology